Category: Robots

LEGO has finally announced a new version of their popular Mindstorms robot building system. It’s amazing it took them so long. Hopefully it was worth the wait. The new system sports a 32-bit microcontroller “brick,” Bluetooth wireless connectivity, Mac support, three servo motors, and an ultrasonic sensor. The kit will sell for US$250 and should be on sale in August. After the jump, see more specs and a nifty pic of the new programmable brick and the new servo and sensor designs.

[Via Gizmodo]

Dr. Gianmarco Radice and a group of students from Glasgow University think they have a workable idea for redirecting an Earth-threatening asteroid: paint the sucker. Commonly envisioned schemes of blowing up asteroids (or detonating a bomb near them) could potential turn one deadly jumbo lump of ice and rock into a number of them. The Glasglow team believes that by painting parts of the asteroid (dark to increase temperature, light to decrease it), you could alter its course. The team has been given 300,000 pounds for three-year study on the feasibility of sending robot graffiti artists into space to go Christo all over any asteroids in our path (such as Apophis, a 390-meter ball of dirty-ice fun that could wreck havoc with Earth in 2036). Other methods will be studied too, such as using a space mirror to melt a portion of the asteroid to create a natural propellant stream.

If you’ve gotten the Jan ’06 issue of Wired, you’ve seen that our favorite creepy robot, Albert Hubo, made the cover. The cover story is the “50 Best Bots Ever.” It’s a disappointing piece of fluff that’s got little to do with informing people on real world progress in real world robotics. First off, there are 15 fictional robots in the list. What is the criteria here? Most popular? Ceratinly not. Commander Data and the B9 from Lost in Space are not here. Most influential in real-world robotics? That doesn’t appear to be the case either. Cool factor? Well, there’s no Bender from Futurama or Rosie from the Jetsons.

More significantly, there’s no mention of BEAM robotics anywhere, no Robosapien, no Kismet, no COG, no DaVinci cart, no MyRealBaby, no Furbie, no Mecho-Gecko, no HelpMate, no swarm bots, no battlebots, no Heathkit Hero. In the grand scheme of robot evolution, aren’t all of these more important than Astroboy and Gort from “The Day the Earth Stood Still”?

BEAM guru J Wolfgang Goerlich posted a link to the Leaf Project in response to this blog item where I mentioned the WowWee Chimp Head.

This is an exciting example of what could be done with this animatronic “toy.” It would probably be fairly easy to bolt this body-less chimp onto the top of the robot cart and wire up the chimp’s motors. And you thought that Einstein robot was kinda creepy…

Robots.Net has a list of their top ten robot gift ideas (plus a few runners up). If you have a servo-head on your holiday list and you’re looking for some last-minute gift suggestions, check it out.

Personally, as much as we think the tech in the animatronic WowWee chimp head is cool, we suspect that this is one of those relatively expensive (US$150) presents that’ll enjoy about four or five days worth of play before it ends up gathering dust in the basement. It’ll definitely be fun to see if hackers do anything interesting with it. Just look at the cool stuff hackers and artists did with those otherwise dumb-ass talking fish.

It looks sort of like a high-tech Roach Motel on wheels, but it means roaches no harm. In fact, it wants to hang out, to be an accepted member of the pest community.

These sweet-looking bots are part of a project at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne to study roach behavior up close and personal. The site has all sorts of detailed information on the project and the bots’ construction.

[Via Make]

Years in the making, but I have FINALLY updated the support site for my Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots. I’ve corrected mistakes from the book, added a few hacks and clarifications, and provided links to things like the PDF instructions for making “Mousey the Junkbot: (as it appeared in Make vol. 2) and to a video clip from a guy who made of a version of the DiscRover with added edge-detection capability.

It is still highly recommended that anyone building the projects in the book read through the “Building Robots” conference on Shop Talk for current info, but most of the critical problems/changes to-date have now been added to the robot pages.

Turns out the Korean robot with the severed head of Alberto Einstein (sorta) is no joke. He made the rounds of the APEC Summit as reported earlier. We know Al was short, but that short? It’s enough to give a cyborg a complex.

More photos of the bot, most from before it got the Albert head plant, can be found at the Lab’s website.

[Via Robots.Net]

“Cute Cool Wild Smart” They forgot “Obscenely Expensive.” It’s true that this awesome-looking bot can do more than the WowWee Robosapien right out of the box (like talk to your LAN and send pictures to your desktop and respond to commands from your PC over its WiFi link). But these who-cares capabilities will cost you US$7000!

A Robosapien (Version 2, US$250) can do many of nuvo’s tricks as-is, and using the many online hacks and Robosapien hacks books, you can add most of nuvo’s bells and whistles yourself (at a fraction of the cost).

BTW: Check out the upcoming Robosapien V2 commercials here.

More images of the nuvo and Tech Specs after the jump.

Here’s one for you deep geeks in the hiz-ouse (you of fainter heads can turn away now).

Rick Bickle, of the Dallas Personal Robotics Group, has posted an awesomely simple circuit that turns a ubiquitous 555 Timer integrated circuit into a Pulse-Width Modulator that can be used to control DC motors.

Pulse-Width Modulation (or PWM) is a common way of controlling the speed of a motor (where pulses are sent to the motor at a given rate, turning the power on and off, which is used as a method of speed control). PWM is usually handled with a microcontroller chip and module, but this little circuit uses an el cheapo 8-pin 555 IC chip (which even Radio Shack still carries and they don’t carry much of anything anymore) and other common analog components. This would be a great way to control a BEAM or other type of robot where you were trying to reduce or eliminate reliance on computer control.