Category: Robots

While the Boston Dynamics’ BigDog quadraped has been getting lots of ink and electrons recently (and with good reason), we’ve been spending our time pouring over the work of the Stanford RiSE Project.

It’s so inspiring to see the evolution of the work that’s been done at Bob Full’s Poly-PEDAL Lab at Berkeley, UMich’s RHex hexapods, and the earlier Sprawl bots from Stanford. All of these designs were inspired by nature and insects’ and geckos’ abilities to climb vertical surfaces. Next stop? Climbing on ceilings. Woo-hoo!

Here’s a direct link to the Spinybot II movie.

[And if you haven’t seen the BigDog video yet, it’s definitely worth a look.]

Street Tech pal J. Wolfgang Goerlich has a little piece on GoRobotics about some students at Virginia Military Institute who came up with a novel way of destroying ticks. A robotic rover (made from a hacked R/C monster truck toy) drives around dragging a “skirt” behind it that’s been treated with a pesticide. The ticks hop onto the skirt and are exposed to the deadly chemical, killing them without having to expose the entire area to the harmful chems. As Mr. Spock might say: “Fascinating.”

Wired also has a piece on the project.

While our Glorious Leader is freaked out over human-animal clone hybrids, I’m much twitchier about animal-machine conjugations — ever since I saw a roadkill rabbit mechanically reanimated into a creepy SRL robo-contraption [shudder]. But with robo-rats, fish-controlled robots, and robo-roaches skittering about labs and workshops worldwide, monstrous hybrids are already here.

The latest Frakenbot is based on a pretty nifty idea. It’s a robot that hijacks a slime mold’s (Physarum polycephalum) natural light-avoiding behavior, taking the robot along for the ride when it seeks out a moist, dark place to slither into. At the moment, this is done remotely — the mold is grown separately, on top of a sensor circuit that can sense as the mold moves away from light, The computer connected to the mold-sensor then wirelessly sends that movement information to a six-legged robot. This may seem to some like a rather elaborate way of creating a simple light-avoiding robot, but the longterm goal here is to understand how to make use of an organism’s natural behavioral routines to power and control future nano-scaled robots.

[BTW: “Moldies” in the title refers to the life-forms in Rudy Rucker’s novel Freeware, beings made out of a smart plastic and gene-tweaked molds and algaes that can make themselves into any shape/device desired.]

[Via Boing Boing]

Oh those precocious scamps at MIT’s Media Lab, what’ll they imagineer next? Perhaps a phone-screening robo-squirrel? Too silly to be true? Gotta be a prank? Nope, real as rain.

Stefan Marti is working on a robot (housed inside of a stuffed animal) that can receive your mobile phone calls, talk to the caller, consult a “friends” list, and even read your body language to determine whether to put the call through to you (via a built-in speaker phone) or politely send the caller to voice-mail. If the robo-squirrel thinks you should take the call, he starts vibrating with varying levels of intensity depending on a determination of how much you might like to talk to the caller. So, if he’s rockin’ so hard, his fur starts flying off, it’s probably FiestyNrrrd, that hot grrrl you’ve been chatting up on MySpace. Of course, she’s gonna dump your ass like a roaming call when she finds out that you have an electronic furry screening your calls. Even a riot grrrl knows when the techno-fetishism’s gone too far.

Make has two nifty Roomba interfacing projects, one on how to build a serial interface (you remember the serial interface, don’t you? Ah…RS232, we knew you well…), the other one using Spark Fun’s BlueSMiRF module to create a Bluetooth wireless interface.

While perusing the lovely new Make site, I discovered this video of my Mousey the Robot project, as demo’d by Phillip Torrone. It shows his dog chasing the bot around his kitchen. Pets and miniature robots — always a good time.

Other Mousey items posted here:
Mousebot Revisited – Monday, January 30, 2006
Robots – Update to Street Tech’s Robot Project Pages – Thursday, December 08, 2005
Make in the Boston Globe – Friday, November 11, 2005
Me and Mousey on G4TV – Monday, July 25, 2005
Mousey’s Papa Found! – Sunday, May 29, 2005
Mousey the Junkbot Sample Pages from Make – Thursday, May 19, 2005
Make Vol. 2 is Out! – Thursday, May 19, 2005
Robot Book Parts Bundles – Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Fun, loose-brained interview with BEAM guru and robot toy designer Mark Tilden on You Review Network. Contains some details on the next generation of robots coming from Tilden/Wowwee Toys.

I also found out via the piece that there’s a “doc sci-fi feature film” about Tilden that’s been making the rounds. Hope that’s made widely available at some point.

A builder of my Mousey the Junkbot, as featured in my robot book and in Make Vol. 2, has posted his step-by-step building instructions on the Instructables website. Really nice job on the documentation, with some additional tips and tricks not covered in the two previous builds.

A Spanish acitivist/art group called La Fabrica de Cosas Bonitas has received a grant to create 20 “autonomous non-violent agents” that will protest at the G8 summit in 2007. The robot protestors were inspired by the increasing trend towards using robots for violent, military uses.

via We Make Money Not Art
via Engadget

Robot Magazine has a nice piece about the new LEGO Mindstorms NXT system that was announced last week at CES. The article includes a video of Soren Lund, who’s been the director of Mindstorms development since the beginning, showing off a number of bots and the new system’s capabilities.