Robot

2020-01-01T20:20:00.000+10:00

A ROBOT is a programmable machine or a virtual artificial intelligence that can carry out a series of complicated motions or tasks.

What Is Arduino For: Robots!

2011-12-12T02:05:00.001+10:00

Arduino: Robot Board

What Is Arduino? Arduino is an open-source ROBOT platform, it is "easy" and flexible, of course it's not easy at all - unless you already know about electronics and open source platforms, and even then — like all open source projects, you'll have to map out a mesh network of forums, irc channels, blogs, tutorials — learning about how it's fragmented over the years — which is a 3rd party product — which is true to the ideology of the original Arduino. But Enough whinging because it IS actually really cool.

Arduino is an open-source single-board microcontroller, descendant of the open-source Wiring platform, designed to make the process of using electronics in multidisciplinary projects more accessible. The hardware consists of a simple open hardware design for the Arduino board with an Atmel AVR processor and on-board input/output support. The software consists of a standard programming language compiler and the boot loader that runs on the board. — Wikipedia

If you don't understand all of that don't worry — it's just nerd gibberish for "Arduino is a DIY circuit board for making cool home made robots* — (*but you will have to study a little bit)" Arduino is not just the board though, it's also the software that controls it, of course it's open source and cross platform (windows osx and linux).

Here is a very cool robot made with an arduino:

Autonomous Robot Vehicle Controlled by Your Mind

2011-02-19T21:26:00.001+10:00

Sensors on MadeInGermany Autonomous Car

MadeinGermany: AUTONOMOUS ROBOT Vehicle is a Robot that can now be controlled by your mind!
The robot car that the Free University of Berlin developed, is the prefecture of car technology for the autonomous vehicles of the future.

The preliminary work was done between 2006 and 2007 by the development of autonomous vehicle, "Spirit of Berlin", a converted Dodge Caravan, took the 2007 the autonomous robot race in California. The race took place in a closed barracks, a kind of urban environment, under controlled conditions.

MadeinGermany is a VW Passat with drive-by-wire technology. This means that the CAN-bus from the vehicle can be accessed directly from their computer. The CAN bus is the control center of modern vehicles. The engine, brakes, steering wheel etc. send sensor data via the CAN bus and can also access these commands lines obtained. A CAN-bus at the connected computer can speed up the engine, apply the brakes or turn the steering wheel.

MadeinGermany knows its position through the use of a GPS unit from the company Applanix. The GPS signal is received by an antenna and the navigation computer calculates the current vehicle position. An inertial (IMU), equipped with accelerometers and gyroscope, the position of the vehicle will interpolate if a brief occlusion of the satellites occurs - for example, if the vehicle in a tunnel drives or high-rise buildings obscure the satellite signal, the inertial precision further measure the movement of the vehicle and thus the position track of MadeinGermany on the map. So the vehicle from any point in the to every other city be ordered. The computer determines the optimum route in the city map and passes it to the control software.
MadeinGermany recognizes its environment by the use of the following sensors:
1) Six-LUX laser scanners from IBEO with four beams.
2) A rotating laser scanner with 64 jets from Velodyne.
3) seven radar units from Hella, TAW and FMS for the detection of vehicles behind or in front of their car.
4) Four video cameras, especially for images with large dynamic range. One of the video cameras detecting the lane markings, two mediate a stereoscopic (Depth) image of the environment. The fourth camera records the image from driver's perspective.
5) A thermal imaging camera detects pedestrians and animals.

Using of video cameras, they have succeeded navigating in traffic, recognizing the particular shape of the bodies. MadeinGermany calculates the correspondence of the images from two cameras is determined and the stereoscopic depth information of all objects on the road. Just as people with two eyes perceive the world in three dimensions, so does this vehicle. On 13 October at the presentation of MadeinGermany
they showed for the first time the detection of traffic lights on the road. Their goal is to recognize traffic lights in and from any position automatically on the road.

Modular Robotics Introduces 'Cublets'

2011-02-17T10:17:00.001+10:00

Modular Robotics Cubelets

Modular Robotics has released it's first range of little cube robots can be used like voltron to create bigger robots. ROBOTS that respond to light, sound, and temperature.
As of right now the Standard Cubelet Pack is 'out of stock' but the pack comes with 20 cubes available for $300 direct from Modular Robotics.
The kit consists of:
Action Blocks: 2 Drive, 1 Rotate, 1 Speaker, 1 Flashlight, 1 Bar Graph
Sense Blocks: 1 Knob, 1 Brightness, 2 Distance, 1 Temperature
Think/Utility Blocks: 2 Inverse, 1 Minimum, 1 Maximum, 1 Battery, 2 Passive, 2 Blocker
All it needs now are solar panel blocks, gps blocks, wifi and 3G blocks and vision blocks, and some sort of ROS connectivity. Check out Robin Robot's report on Modular Robotics Cubelets:

ROS Robot Operating System Diamondback Released, Implement in Your Robotics Kits

2011-02-13T17:51:00.000+10:00

ROS (Robot Operating System) "Diamondback" is now available. ROS also put together new robot-centric API and guides for installation, that should help new ROS users organize the various ROS libraries. They have setup some example pages of robots that use ROS. Notably, for reasons of low cost robotics, the Lego Mindstorm NXT.
If cheap robots suits you then Lego Mindstorms NXT is for you, this low-cost programmable robotics kit, used in education and by hobbyist throughout the world can be programmed and controlled from your computer using ROS. At the moment NXT owners can take robots made with the Lego Digital Designer, and automatically convert them into robots that you can control ROS using your computer. Check out the R2D2 toy robot, he's a NXT robot but he doesn't utilize ROS.. yet.

Bioloid GP, New Humanoid Robot on the Block

2011-01-29T14:03:00.003+10:00

Reports and videos have been trickling in regarding this new ROBOT, Robotis have release (in Korea anyway) the brand new Bioloid GP (Grant Prix) Humanoid Robot Kit. Retailing at 2.5 million won (about $2240 USD).
This kit means business! it's fast! smooth and quiet, sporting AX-12 and AX-18F quality Dynamixel servos, the aluminium frame is strong and light! perfect for a fighting bot!

Visit the Korean webstore: Bioloid GP

Robot Autonomously Reconstructing 3D Environments

2011-01-26T11:45:00.000+10:00

SLAM Robot "Hector" from Darmstadt Rescue Robot Team

ROBOT vision capturing 3D colored environments with ROS and RGBD SLAM using data from Kinect.. Wait, what? These terms have been thrown around in robotics blogs without any back story or explanation.

Let me break up those acronyms for you. Firstly, what are the robot programmers trying to achieve here?
Robot programmers want to make it possible for an autonomous robot to start in an unknown location in an unknown environment and look around using it's various sensors (camera, distance sensors, sonar etc) and figure out where it is and how to move around.

So working backwards. What is SLAM? SLAM stands for Simultaneous Localization And Mapping, so a robot can autonomously (all by it's self without a human helping) wake up somewhere and look around building a map of its surroundings and knowing where in that map the robot is at all times.

Microsoft Kinect 3D camera

What is RGBD and Kinect? Kinect is Microsoft's robot vision hardware that robot enthusiasts have become very excited about because of the ability to 'hack' the device in order to utilize it to perform tasks that it wasn't initially intended to do. Put simply the Kinect is a 3D camera. RGBD is talking about the camera information from the Kinect, Red Green Blue and then the special one Depth! the depth is the bit that makes it a 3D camera.

Now Finally. What is ROS? ROS stands for Robot Operating System, it has been developed by a company called Willow Garage. ROS is like windows or mac osx, only instead of controlling a computer, it controls robots. ROS is completely free and open source too.

So that's the why (just coz), what (SLAM), and how (RGBD from Kinect plugged into ROS) so now back to the actual story!

The University of Freiburg in Germany has put together a 6D-SLAM (six degrees of freedom) library of code for entry into the ROS 3D Contest. By using the 3D data from the Kinect, the german team have set a new benchmark for "state-of-the-art" in the field of robotic vision and autonomous robot navigation. Because the software they created is available online, you can try it yourself! So grab your Kinect and 3D scan your own world and objects.. maybe using MeshLab to convert the point cloud data into a solid textured mesh object for use in animation.

Robot Operating System (ROS) 3D Contest, Check Out The Amazing Entries.

2011-01-25T11:27:00.000+10:00

ROS (ROBOT Operating System) is a completely open source (BSD) and free for others to use, change and commercialize upon.

ROS is now judging the eighteen awesome entries to the ROS 3D Contest. There's everything from teleoperation to games to libraries for registration and calibration. They say "it's going to be tough choosing who gets a prize on them."

All the entries are here for you to check out yourself. You can even download the code and run on your own Kinect bots. In the meantime check out some highlights:

Check out Garratt Gallagher's entries first.
Kinect-based Person Follower
Minority Report Interface
Kinect Piano and Hand Detection

ROS say they are "grateful that Garratt has taken the time to, not only enter the contest, but go the extra mile to make sure that others can try out his libraries and build on his creative ideas. If you like what you see, you should consider helping out his Bilibot project, which is a low-cost Kinect + Create platform."

You have to check out Garratt's "Customizable Buttons". Using the Kinect, you can draw on a piece of paper to create your own music board. Check it out below:

Original post by kwc at ros.org

Control Robot Arm Live Over the Internet

2011-01-24T17:25:00.000+10:00

Here's your chance to control a ROBOT arm live over the web. Goto French robot website liverobotcontrol.com, register for your free account and you can control the robot arm and play the blocks game! Basically you have three minutes to place blue blocks on the green shelves. You get points for doing so. It's a great concept and a fun and accessible way to experience robotics. It's fun to think of other types of robotic games that can be played like this.

Homebrew Robotics Club Meetup 26th Jan Google Campus

2011-01-23T22:34:00.001+10:00

ROBOT meet up at Google Campus. The January 26th meeting of the Hombrew Robotics Club will be "ROS for the Rest of Us." The meeting will be held at Google in Mountain View, CA.
The featured speaker is Patrick Goebel, who will present his Pi Robot platform (pi-robot-ros-pkg). Patrick also wrote a tutorial on visual object tracking using ROS.
There should also be several other quick ROS presentations, including a Tony Pratkanis presenting his ROS + Neato platform, and some Willow Garage presentations on ROS + Arduino, and ROS + Create + Kinect.
Meeting Details

http://www.ros.org/news/2011/01/january-26th-homebrew-robotics-club-ros-for-the-rest-of-us.html

Autonomous Robot Quadrotors Swarm Cooperatively Building Structure

2011-01-23T15:07:00.000+10:00

The General ROBOTICS, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory integrates computer science, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering in a vibrant, collaborative environment that fosters interactions between students, research staff and faculty. GRASP is responsible for the amazing AUTONOMOUS ROBOT quadrotors that are famous on youtube for their amazing autonomous aerial stunts. They have made robot's work together to lift objects too heavy for any one robot to lift themselves. The next step is seems was to program autonomous robot quadrotors to work together building structures. In the video you can see the robots snapping the pieces together and twisting to make sure they were in place, before going off to collect the next piece. Another cool completely autonomous robot quadrotor that GRASP has invented with autonomous multi-floor indoor navigation. This ROBOT has autonomous navigation with real-time performance on a mobile processor using only onboard sensors (it's thinks all by itself). Incredibly this robot can perform multi-floor mapping, planning, and autonomous control, with the ability to fly indoors and outdoors (in different wind and lighting conditions). The robot uses uses ROS for interprocess communication.

Autonomous Robot That Cleans Your Windows - Windoro

2011-01-23T07:09:00.001+10:00

This AUTONOMOUS ROBOT cleans your windows, Windoro was developed by PIRO a South Korean Robotics Researcher and Manufacturer, and Ilshim Global experts in cleaning mirco fiber product, is the first robot to fill the vertical cleaning niche and while (let's face it) it's rough around the edges with only a accelerometer and bump sensors (with no higher intelligence... yet), retailing for USD $400 forum and blog comments all think it's a bit expensive. No doubt the roller wheels will be need to be cleaned manually, and from the video's I've seen online it's noisy. All this considered, I suspect that this is the first robot in a series of Windoro robots from PIRO with "intelligent" and "eco" versions advertised on their website with the pages under construction. So maybe this is the bait to suck in the early adopters, then release the better versions. PIRO expects 50 billion won in sales (about $43 million US).

Official DARwIn-OP Humanoid Robot Brochure

2010-12-06T08:55:00.002+10:00

Here's the official DARwIn-OP Humanoid Robot Brochure! Of course Michael Overstreet over at his blog is onto it first! :)
Check out photos of the robot brochure here:

http://mike-ibioloid.blogspot.com/2010/12/first-look-at-darwin-op-official.html

Humanoid Robot Kits

2010-12-01T17:41:00.004+10:00

WowWee Robosapien V2 Toy Humanoid Robot. USD ~$200

The Robosapien V2 is the 2nd generation of the Robosapien HUMANOID ROBOT. It is nearly twice the size of the original Robosapien robot, at 24 inches tall. Robosapien V2 combines fluid motion with a multi-sensory, interactive humanoid personality. Capable of autonomous "free roam" mode and is capable interaction with humans.

Features:

Remote control, autonomous "free roam" and guard modes
4 programming modes
Programmable using the remote controller or manually
Speech capability
Multiple levels of environmental interaction, with humans and objects
Sight, sound, and touch sensors
Humanoid body movements, including bending, sitting and standing, lying down and getting up, dancing, waving, martial arts
Speech: Responds verbally to environmental stimuli and to controller commands
Color Vision System: Recognizes colors and skin tones
Stereo Sound Detection System: "Hears" and reacts to sounds
IR Vision: Detects and avoids obstacles; tracks moving objects
True bi-pedal walking with multiple gaits
Precision gripping with articulated fingers
Realistic 2-axis turning head with animated LED eyes
100 pre-programmed functions
2 demonstration modes
Sleep and auto shut-off function
Technical specifications

Dimensions:

Product Length: 22 inches (55.88 cm)
Product Height: 15 inches (38.1 cm)
Product Width: 13 inches (33 cm)
Product Weight: 8 lbs (3.63 kg)

WowWee Femisapien Female Toy Humanoid Robot. USD ~$90

Intelligent and interactive, Femisapien speaks her own language called "emotish" which consists of gentle sounds and gestures. There is no remote required; interact with her directly and she responds to your hand gestures, touch, and sound.

Features:

Comes loaded with 36 functions and 20 interactive routines, so you'll constantly be entertained. There are also 59 “hidden” functions to explore!
RS Femisapien can communicate with, and even control, other WowWee robots, including the original Robosapien!
RS Femisapien will converse with you; speak clearly within approximately 3 feet (1 m) of her, and she will “chat” with you!
Can be used with both the WowWee Roboremote controller and the Robosapien robot’s remote controller (both sold separately) for interactive routines.
Features a Standby Mode to conserve battery power.
RS Femisapien has four adjustable volume settings.
5 x motors
4 x position switches in each joystick hand access up to 56 functions
1 x IR receiver
2 x IR transmitters
1 x microphone to detect words, music and sharp noises
1 x speaker with nearly 90 seconds of sound
2 x tilt sensors for forwards and backwards fall detection

Dimensions:

Product Length: 4 inches (10.2 cm)
Product Height: 15 inches (38.1 cm)
Product Width: 8 inches (20.3 cm)
Product Weight: 1.5 pounds (0.7 KG)

Hitec Robotics ROBONOVA-I Humanoid Robot. USD ~$1300

This exciting new humanoid robot offers educators, students and robotic hobbyists a complete robot package. The stable ROBONOVA-I can walk, run, do flips, cartwheels, dance moves and once programmed, is ready to compete in any Robo One Class. This robot was inspired by Kondo's KHR-1 humanoid robot.

Features:

Advanced robot for students, hobbyists, and educators
Gold anodized metal servo brackets serve as strong and lightweight exoskeleton
Controlled with 16 powerful HSR-8498HB digital servos; includes IR controller
Micom control board can operate up to 24 servos and 16 accessory modules
Simple programming with supplied RoboScript and RoboBasic software

Dimensions:

Product Length: 3.5 inches (8.9 cm)
Product Height: 12.5 inches (31.75 cm)
Product Width: 7 inches (17.8 cm)
Product Weight: 10 pounds (4.53 kg)

Kondo KHR-3HV Humanoid Robot USD ~$1700

This robot taps in at a relatively high 1700 bucks so it's good to hear that they've made cost cutting decisions by making the robot progressively extendible but cleverly leaving out 5 servos giving the base model 17 dof expandable to 22 dof. This enables one extra degree of motion in each arm and leg and one in the body allowing the robot to twist at the waist. The new microcontroller board RCB-4 enables the controls up to 35 serial servos of KHR-3HV Humanoid Robot. The front and rear covers are rigid ABS plastic. The robot sports KRS-255HV servos which have the ability of being serially networked (no more messy control wire bunches) the servos have an amazing 14kg/cm torque capacity. These servos feature an all metal gear system with ball-bearing supported output shafts for a smoother and more powerful operation.

Dimensions:

Product Length: 5.07 inches (12.9 cm)
Product Height: 15.8 inches (40.15 cm)
Product Width: 7.65 inches (19.44 cm)
Product Weight: 3.3 pounds (1.5 kg)

ROBOTIS Bioloid Humanoid Robot. USD ~$350 - $3000

The Bioloid Humanoid Robot is probably the most famous robot kit on the market. It comes in 3 base kits, the Bioloid Beginner Kit, the Bioloid Comprehensive Kit and the Bioloid Premium Kit (think small regular and large) and the Bioloid Expert Kit (le grande at $3k). Based around graphical programming, legolike brackets/servos that can be rearranged to build a number of different robots (dog, human/s, t-rex, multipod, scorpion). The Bioloid Premium Kit comes with better (LIPO) batteries, a gyro, IR sensor (basically the large kit can see and sense when it falls over)

Features:

Excellent humanoid walking performance (Adjustable posture while walking)
Various sensors including Gyro, distance, IR and more external ports
Remote control capability (IR-default, Zigbee-optional)
C-Style programming & motion teaching with RoboPlus S/W (USB interface included)
Transparent humanoid skin for customization
Digital Packet communication with daisy chain topology
Building various robots using versatile expansion mechanism

Dimensions:

Product Length: 3.93 inches (10 cm)
Product Height: 15.6 inches (39.7 cm)
Product Width: 7.48 inches (19 cm)
Product Weight: 3.75 pounds (1.7 kg)

Aldebaran Robotics Nao Humanoid Robot - USD ~$16,000

25 Degree of Freedom humanoid robot
Embedded Computer and WiFi included
Vision system, voice recognition, text to speech and more standard
Functional hands can pick up and grasp objects

The NAO Humanoid Robot from Aldebaran Robotics is a companion, assistant and research platform. With 25 degrees of freedom, NAO is capable of executing a wide range of movements (walking, sitting, standing up, dancing, avoiding obstacles, kicking, seizing objects, etc.)

NAO is a fully autonomous humanoid robot and can establish a secure connection to the Internet to download and broadcast content. Nao is the most capable humanoid development platform on the market today.

Features:

High-precision movement:
Nao has many sensors including two cameras, and a sonar so he can understand where he is in the world.

Multiple interactions:
Nao can speak and understand spoken commands, the robot can hear where the sounds are coming from. IR and Wi-Fi give the robot the ability to communicate with other devices.

Fully programmable:
Noobs to experts can program Nao with the propriety software Choregraphe. Thanks to its cross-platform design (Linux, Mac OS and Windows), behaviours can be written in C, C++, Urbi, and Python.

Dimensions:

Product Height: 22.83 inches (58 cm)
Product Weight: 9.47 pounds (4.3 kg)

HACKED Neato XV-11 Robot Vacuum Cleaner LIDAR Scanner

2010-12-01T03:12:00.002+10:00

A hacked LIDAR system (Light Detection And Ranging is an optical remote sensing technology that measures properties of scattered light to find range and/or other information of a distant target.) from the Neato XV-11 ROBOT Vacuum Cleaner has shown up over at RobotBox. This is exciting news because it means hobbyists are one step closer to having access to cost effective spatial awareness integrated into their robotic projects.

Bellow is an extract from a demonstration talk outlining the LIDAR system in the robot, and really illustrating how useful this system will be and why this news is so exciting for the robotics community.

Fanuc Robot Arms

2010-11-30T11:10:00.003+10:00

FANUC is a Japanese electromechanical manufacturer specializing in ROBOTICS . One of the largest robot manufacturers in the world. FANUC is an acronym for Factory Automatic Numerical Control. Check out this robot's visual sorting ability! using a IR camera and a regualr color camera it can sort these skittles at an amazing rate!

This is also fun! This robot (HOOPS) can shoot hoops with an invredible 98% accuracy, beating the record for humans at 96% u can even try your hand at programming HOOPS yourself to see how close you can get at controlling the robot.

Vision Robot ROS

2010-11-29T13:40:00.001+10:00

Just a quick note that the brown-ros-pkg now includes ardrone_brown. A driver for the AR.Drone. What does this mean? Well it means, as with every new robotic advancement that skynet is one step closer to taking over, this little step gives autonomous quadrocopter robots the ability to track visually. As you'll see in this video below showing the system in action tracking an AR Marker:

So what's this brown-ros-pkg?
brown-ros-pkg is collection of software resources shared towards helping users new to robotics and Willow Garage's ROS to get their robots up and moving as quickly as possible.

What about ROS?
ROS (Robot Operating System) is a completely open source (BSD) and free for others to use, change and commercialize upon -- our primary goal is to enable code reuse in robotics research and development. Willow Garage is strongly committed to developing open source and reusable software. With the help of an international robotics community, we've released software we are building on ROS at code.ros.org in the "ros-pkg" and "wg-ros-pkg" projects. There, you'll find both research and core libraries we are working on. This includes drivers and novel algorithms, as well as ROS-integration for many popular open source robotics libraries.
ROS development is an ongoing joint effort within the robotics community. The system is based on Switchyard, written by Morgan Quigley at Stanford, and has seen numerous contributions from institutions around the world. To find out more about ROS and ROS community efforts, please visit ros.org

The same PID controller and vision stack (ar_recog) is used unmodified on three different robots (iRobot Create, Aldebaran Nao, and Willow Garage's PR2) to create ARTag following behavior. The controller and vision processor are both available from the Brown ROS Pkg ( http://code.google.com/p/brown-ros-pkg/ )

Leaked DARwIn-OP Images: Exciting New Humanoid Robot

2010-11-27T03:23:00.001+10:00

DARwIn-OP Humanoid Robot

Here's some exciting robot news! The next evolution of the DARwIn Humanoid Robots the DARwIn-OP unveiling at the The 2010 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots has been announced. This robot is no toy, it's an open source research platform and as such isn't cheap. With a rumoured price of $8000 USD it's certainly out of reach most of us, but those who are actively involved in robotic research this is actually cheap! While just a rumour it comes in half that of the NAO Humanoid Robot. National Science Foundation (NSF) funds development of the RoMeLa/Virginia Tech humanoid robot, DARwIn-OP is truely an open source endeavour with users encouraged to develop not only the software but hardware as well with the CAD files freely available. Which will be great for makerbot fans because you will be able to print your own parts! Everybody is now waiting for Michael Overstreet from I, Bioloid, who mentioned that he'll be attending the DARwIn-OP workshop on December 6th to 8th, to snap more photos and hopefully some nice footage of it in action Michael?? :)

UPDATE: from their twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/romelavt/status/9480355484532736

Robots Need Love Too

2010-11-26T11:46:00.000+10:00

Robot video!! This is taken directly from the youtube description:
Inspired by early 80s gang movies, Robots tells the story of two rival gangs who engage in their own back-alley version of robot wars, pitting one robot against the other in a battle to the finish. But when one robot chooses compassion over malice, the gang members are forced to question their own hatred and animosity towards each other.

ROBOTS by Dan Mangan

CONCEIVED & PRODUCED by Dan Mangan & Mike Lewis
WRITTEN & DIRECTED by Mike Lewis
CINEMATOGRAPHY by Todd M Duym
EDITED by Tariq Hussain & Mike Lewis
WARDROBE STYLIST Krista Sung
ART DIRECTION Colin Moore & Scotty Chan
STILLS PHOTOGRAPHER Frank Nelissen

CAST (in order of appearance)

Dan Mangan
Ben Worcester
Lindsay Drummond
Aaron Joyce
Tyler Bancroft
Nick Hunnings
Tariq Hussain
Zach Gray
Kirsten Slenning
Colin Moore

Egg Bot The Egg Printer Open Source Robot

2010-11-12T23:39:00.000+10:00

The Egg Bot is not just the the final boss of Chapter 6 in Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. This is a real life robot! Well, The Egg Bot is an art project originally designed by Bruce Shapiro in 1990, He's made the open-source art robot (it's really a plotter/printer) that plots on spherical or egg-shaped objects from ping pong balls to ostrich eggs.
The Egg Bot is available as a kit, to build at home, it's highly adjustable the Eggbot chassis is made of tough fiberglass. The Eggbot kit can be assembled in a few hours, requiring only screwdrivers.
It prints vector art from Inkscape (another open source project) via USB on mac windows or linux!
The Eggbot kit requires no programming or soldering the board is fully assembled and tested. Just bolt it together and plug it into your USB port.

For More information go to the EggBot website: http://egg-bot.com/ you can purchase the robot for $195 from here: http://evilmadscience.com/tinykitlist/171-egg-bot another interesting link is this one: http://www.schmalzhaus.com/ a list of projects that one of the collaborators have been working, some great little hardware cards for communicating with the robots from the computer.

3D Dancing Robot Video: HRP-4C Digital Content Expo 2010.

2010-10-17T01:59:00.000+10:00

3D Humanoid Robot Video on Youtube! HRP-4C Dancing Robot

ROBOT SINGING AND DANCING LIVE ON STAGE IN 3D ON YOUTUBE! This is as close to the future as it's going to get until it's the actual real future! On Demand 3D! with a choice of 3D options from stereoscopic (cross eyed mode) to traditional red and blue glasses! BUT THEN! The dancing humanoid robot on stage! HRP-4C kicks it with her dance troop of humans as she belts out some J-Pop at the Digital Content Expo 2010. Forgetting for a moment that watching someone pretend to be a woman while miming and dancing on stage is scarily close to watching a tranny show.. This is so freaking super cool! Check out the 3D Humanoid Robot Video here! Goto Youtube for more 3D options LINK.

Control your NXT Robot with your Android phone

2010-10-15T23:14:00.000+10:00

lego minstorm android app

Control your lego mindstorm robot from your android phone with this new app MINDdroid, you'll need android version 2.1 or later (as with all the cools apps these days) MINDdroid is a remote control app that allows u to wirelessly control your NXT brick via bluetooth using the onscreen touch controls the the tilt sensor in the phone you can make your robot move and turn. to download use the QR code tot he right here.. or download from the market. The source code for MINDdroid is released under the GPL v3 license and downloadable here for free:
http://github.com/NXT/LEGO-MINDSTORMS-MINDdroid

BEAR: Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot: Humanoid

2010-10-15T20:21:00.000+10:00

The BEAR™ — Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot. This bad boy is super cool! remote controlled, tracked legged military bot that can lift injured people out of harms way, it balances on it's 'ankles' reacts to uneven surfaces, the most impressive feature it's the humanoid robots EPIC hydraulic arms! check him out at his homepage: http://vecna.com/robotics/solutions/bear/index.shtml and check out his promo video below.

HRP-4C Singing Humanoid Robot

2010-10-15T15:59:00.000+10:00

HRP-4C Humanoid Robot can balance walk and sing! the robots team have integrated a number of technologies together achieving a pretty good realism to the robot. Yamaha's Vocaloid is the main technology behind the singing, they have also lip synced, added facial expressions and head movements (captured from when they recorded the real singer). Overall an amazing achievement but still a bit gross the way the eye lids bend off away from the eye balls.. and the way that the corner of the lips look like she's covering up herpetic lesions. have a look at diginfo.tv's the youtube clip below.

Suralp Humanoid Robot: Video

2010-10-15T14:32:00.000+10:00

Suralp Humanoid Robot, (Sabancı University Robot Research Laboratory Platform) this guy is pretty late to the party, and to be frank looks pretty lame, in terms on the fluidity and speed of it's movements it's just got nothing compared to any of the other major humanoid robots. But I can assume that the underlying code has got lots of potential. The robot can balance walk see and avoid obstacles. If it trips/falls it throws its hands out to try to stop itself falling completely.
http://www.youtube.com/user/humanoidrobotsuralp Check out Suralp's youtube page for more videos.