While Outerspace may not have an extremely useful function, being an art installation, we really enjoyed reading through the build information. Basically, Outerspace is supposed to appear to be curious, exploring it’s surroundings and reacting to your contact. We do enjoy a little bit of personality in robots, so this seems like it could be fun. The head has 5 photo sensors and each piece of the “arm” has capacitive sensors. This allows Outerspace to sense what is going on. The motion itself is controlled by 4 servos in the base pulling cables that run through the body.
The programming seems like it could use a little work to achieve the effect of being “curious”, but we see potential here. You can see a video of it in action here.
[via today and tomorrow]
Kinda looks and acts like a programmable female toy!
that saxophone in the background isn’t helping ;)
This looks familiar…. I like how the servos are mounted outside of the arm. It seems like a good way to decrease the mass of the arm so you can make it more responsive. They should mount a webcam or an optical mouse sensor on the end so they can do more sophisticated computer vision.
it’s articulated, long, black, and reacts to touch, what more do you need; although i do agree with matt, with the saxophone music in the video, i thought i was watching a porno.
It *is* roboporn.
Unfortunately, all the documentation of the actual work linked from the site seems to be offline.
Did anyone else think “Robot tentacle hentai/porn”?
Now if it had a flame thrower at the end, it would make a statement.
@Loren – I dig ya, but a lighter would make a better understatement
Please…don’t market this any further without making it seem like a sex toy. For crying out loud…I get the kickass logistics of it, but why even film a second of yourself stroking and playing with what appears to be a freaky mechanical sex toy? A long black, interactive knob is just so intimidating…not to mention the subtle-elevator-porn tune… I mean……. W..T..F?!
Oop, a Krafty Caleb production….
I can’t believe nobody has said that this looks like tony stark’s “Dummy” yet.
Well, if you make this smaller and controlled with brain waves (like the toy Hackaday posted some time ago) it could be a good sex toy or dream come true for people with ED. It is couple of billion dollar industry right?
Kind of pulls on your anthropomorphic heart strings.
I cant think of anything else after seeing the video, it is a dildo :)
Well if you look below the Video in the link, that’s exactly what it says to,
“Incredible sensitive and reactive dildo robot creature form(sic) the outerspace project”
I feel a little dirty after watching that…
Very neat!
It is reminiscent of Golan Levin’s “Double-Taker,” but on a smaller scale:
http://www.flong.com/projects/snout/
It is exciting to see things like this happening at the intersection of engineering and art. There are many artists, and many coders, but very few who identify as both. Coding should be as easy as writing for artistic types, as common and expressive as painting, and seen on every computer as an option for creative investigation. Merged with electronics, embedded systems, and robotics, the possibilities are huge!