Category: Robots

We covered Chris Myers’s work here before, his wonderful Plexi-clad Palm robot. Now he’s got some Roombas he’s been hacking up to similarly impressive effect. He made one, a US$30 Craigslist special, into a sort of development platform, using an Arduino microcontroller and the Bluesmurf Bluetooth module. Thus outfitted, Roomba became a wine sommelier. Ah, Roomba, so sophisticated… But soon, Roomba answered the call to serve and traded in his towel and corkscrew for a gun and a bandelerro. Chris outtfitted his Red Roomba with an Airsoft gun and a homebuilt ammo hopper. Hell hath no fury like a Roomba scorned! (Be sure to check out the video of the militant vacuum in action).

Does Robot Chicken know about this? Sega Toys has released the Dream Chick, a baby chick robo pet that spreads its wings and chirps “pipitsu” (Japanese for “cheep, cheep,” I presume). Speaking of cheap, the Dream Chicks cost US$13 from Play-Asia.

I think Jake von Slatt and I-Wei have a contest going to see who can post the most and coolest steampunky tech projects. We just blogged about I-Wei’s amazing Steam Beetle a few weeks back, and now, he has a new creation, each one always seeming to outdo the last. The R2S2 (R2 Steam 2) is a steam-powered droid built using the Cheddar steam boiler I-Wei uses in most of his creations, and Wilesco D48 marine engines. The R2 body is a Hasbro R2D2 Interactive Droid he snagged for cheap on eBay. I love the boiler pressure needle guage on the face plate. Check out the video. It’s hysterical. He has a little “ad” for his other Crabu creations at the end.

I just found out that I-Wei is going to be at the Maker Faire next month showing off his steam vehicles. I’ll finally get a cnance to meet him. I’m going to be there running Mousey the Junkbot workshops. Any other Street Techies going?

When I first saw pico the robot on the MAKE blog, I thought its Li-Poly battery, which appears gigantic here, looked familiar. It’s the same brand, Full River, and type as is used in the FlyTech Dragonfly. The builder of pico even credits the indoor R/C flyer market with developing the miniaturized batteries, thinner PCBs, and other weight-conscious components that made his dime-sized bot possible. The name pico refers to a Sumobot category which has been proposed but has so far remained unrealized, until now — although some work will have to be done to stop pico from driving off the table, as it does now. The builder is looking to an even smaller battery and motor to allow him to add other parts, such as a wireless bootloader for hands-free programming.

Our BEAM-builder friend Harold Ilano sent us details about his latest project, a palm-sized bot called the Trooper. It utilizes four mini servos, six 74AC240 chips, five LDRs (Light-Dependent Resistors), two touch whiskers, a cellphone Li-ion battery pack, some perf board, and lots of paper clips, shrink tubing, and wire to create a light-seeking, random-wander robot with a low-voltage monitor and plenty of LBLs (Little Blinking Lights). Great job, Harold! Can’t wait to see the video clips.

Chris Anderson, the big hat at Wired, has been pursuing some fun geekery on his blog, The Long Tail. He wants to start a 3D Robotics League, and in that vein has launched a project to build an under US$1,000 UAV. As part of that, last night, he bodged up a prototype of a LEGO NXT Autopilot using the new Hitechnic Gyro Sensor and a compass sensor. He plans to upgrade the compass to Bluetooth GPS. He may also have to add a ultrasonic sensor to handle landings. Still, pretty freakin’ cool.

In other LEGO Mindstorms NXT news, another builder used the Hitechnic gyro sensor to make an NXT faux Segway. Check out this video.

Engadget hipped me to this robot kit that turns your Nintendo DS into the brains of a three-wheeled robotic platform. The kit costs US$100 and comes with three servos, the platform, wheels, battery, cable, and all hardware. You do need the DSerial2 board to connect the servos to your DS. With your RoboDS, you can do things like hook up a webcam so that people can drive it over the Web. The prototype of the bot has been set up this way. You can drive around the builder’s basement, watch other people drive, and chat with other would-be builders. Kits will allegedly be available on April 7th.

The NEC PaPeRo — the robot we love to hate because, well, it doesn’t exist except in the land of press relations and tech blog photo ops — is once again in the land of PR and photo ops! When last we left our intrepid proto-PerRo, it was sniffing our food and tasting our booze. Now it’s allegedly going to do our blogging for us. At the next meeting of the Association of Natural Language Processing, NEC is going to show off its AI software that can home in on keywords in conversation, go on the Net to fetch content related to those words, and blog the results. Which, like the food and beverage testing, and a bunch of other things that PaPeRo has not done in the real world, this has nothing whatsoever to do with this robotics platform except its a cute casemod for the PC that NEC is testing these wares on. And it leads to idiots like me doing blog items on it showing pics of the lovable little Weeble interacting with cute Asian chicks in lo-rise. Everybody’s happy.

Robert Oschler, from RobotsRule, writes:

Here’s a video that shows a Robopet being controlled via voice using Robosapien Dance Machine, the free open source program for scripting Wow Wee’s robots and controlling them by voice.

This short demonstration video shows the Robopet being put through its paces and shows how talking to the bot is much more fun and lifelike than using the remote control. Most importantly, the vid shows what happens when a Robopet encounters the average computer geeks’ socks.

I just found out that MAKE:Philly, is running a contest for their next gathering based on my Mousey the Junkbot project from MAKE Vol. 2. MAKE:Philly is a local gathering of Makers, and like Dorkbot, they have regular meetings with presenters and projects, in their case, using MAKE magazine as a chief inspiration. For the March 18th meeting, they’re hosting a Mousebot Challenge. The winner’s mousebot will be judged on speed, construction, and design. The winner gets a boxed set of the first year of MAKE. Cool. I can’t wait to see the entries.

The group’s forum has some discussion and tips and includes a PDF with a clear, corrected schematic which also includes instructions for adding a second bump switch in the back. You could use this to make a tail (out of a piece of guitar string and a paper clip) like the Solarbotics Herbie the Mousebot has.