Since he spends way too much time programming robots, Pavel Petrovic, felt he should delegate the task of walking his robot dog… to his other robot. No, that isn’t the real story, but there isn’t a lot of justification for the project besides it being a neat trick. LEGO IR tower support for WowWee bots had already been developed, but Pavel decided to try controlling the bots using the LEGO RCX. BrickOS provides direct control of the RCX’s IR port. Pavel’s program lets the simple LEGO bot issues commands to the RoboPet to lead it around the room. It works, but isn’t too reliable because there is no way for the RCX to determine the absolute position of the dog. Have a look at Pavel’s site to see videos of it in action.

[thanks Robert Oschler]

Continue reading “Walk Your Robot Dog With LEGO” →

I usually don’t feature LEGO projects because there is already a huge community and probably better places to get your LEGO info. That being said, I couldn’t pass this project up. It has an infrared sensor for detecting objects and only uses three pneumatic cylinders. The most interesting aspect of the hand is its underactuated fingers. The built in “mechanical intelligence” allows for shape adaptation even though there are fewer actuators than degrees of freedom. Don’t worry there’s a link to clear that last bit up.

[thanks ator1]

Continue reading “Lego Self-adaptive Hand” →