Junk Bots Win Awards In Vietnam

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In a national competition for creativeness in children, junk bots have reigned supreme. Pictured above is a detail from one of [Vu Van Thankg]’s junk bots. Created entirely from parts pulled from the trash, this thing has 11 motors which supposedly allow full arm and hand control. We know you’ll be upset at how little information there is, but the pictures alone show so much. Just look at the rig he put together for this arm. If that isn’t inspiring, we don’t know what is.

[via BoingBoing]

25 thoughts on “Junk Bots Win Awards In Vietnam

  1. I think this kind of stuff will become even more interesting when computer vision (open source particularly) develops a bit more. When it gets to the point where a robot can ‘see’ all of it’s limbs, know where the joints are etc, it removes the need for such complex feedback systems in the libs themselves, and allows you to knock something up from junk more easily

  2. It makes more sense for a robot to sense its appendages, rather than using vision to determine their location. As far as I know, no biological system requires sight to determine body position, because vision is so unreliable.

  3. @Andar_b
    Does it not take considerably longer to pick things up with your eyes closed? You use fingertip touch to determine grip, which is always going to be essential, but apart from back I can’t see that you use that much feedback from nerves in your arms when performing tasks. I suppose though you do have the ability to make fairly precise relative movements (like typing), but these are only relative without any spacial context.

  4. @Andar_b: There is a disease of the inner ear which causes its victims to lose their balance when they close their eyes. While we have all the usual kinesthetic senses we have so much brain devoted to vision that that tends to dominate unless it’s unavailable for some reason. Of course robots of today’s scale are going to be more like simpler animals that don’t have all that directed vision processing, and kinesthetic senses are a lot easier to process and deal with.

  5. Awesome stuff there. Be cool to see it all hooked up to a controller to do some automated stuff but even just as it is, is awesome.

    I have to say, Hackaday has been awesome this past week. A welcome return to form!

  6. And to those that say it’s harder to pick something up with your eyes closed, you may realise that it is because you can’t see where the object you’re aiming for is.

    Instead try to touch your nose, tip of your ears, etc. with your eyes closed. Easy as.

  7. So “hackers” who “hack” by connecting shield to arduino to buzz a noise or blink a led should be ashamed that even kids can do real hacks from nothing more than garbage instead turning expensive equipment into garbage

  8. Great,i always think that we throw away a lot usefull things and we pay again for new thing that can be done with our trash.
    it’s not only a matter of throw away money,it’s important because you waste some precious resource and resource aren’t endless.

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