Auto-drummer

November 13, 2009 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COl1xmWAjUw]

Mix a cup of mechanical engineering with a dash of drum set and you end up with Steve, the robotic drummer. We know that it uses an MSA-T Midi Decoder but that’s about the extent of what has been shared. Just from observing the video, we think Steve’s got a few things going for him when compared to PEART, the robot drummer we saw back in 2005. Steve features two sticks for each drum and symbol and seems to be quite responsive.

Steve’s great, but we still think Rick Allen’s got this thing beat. Although this is a quality build, there’s no replacement for a human that can bang the drum in millions of subtly different way. That isn’t to say we don’t see potential in the hack. Perhaps it’s time to update a classic idea, the robotic orchestra. Don’t know what we mean? Check out 3:58 into the video embedded after the break.

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Robot Interface Lets Fingers Do The Walking

November 12, 2009 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=945Z2xtdEBE]

We’re filing this one under “best interface implementation”. This robot is controlled by finger gestures on the surface of an iPod Touch. It can walk forward, turn, sidestep, jump, and kick a ball based on the input it receives from your sweaty digits. Unlike vehicles controlled by an iPhone (or by Power Wheels), this has some potential. Especially considering the inevitable proliferation of multi-touch devices in our everyday lives.

Single-wing Flight Based On Maple Seed Aerodynamics

November 11, 2009 by Mike Szczys 77 Comments

one-winged-flight

The Samara Micro-Air-Vehicle is a product of over three years of work at the University of Maryland’s Aerospace Engineering Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory. The Samara is an applicant in the DARPA nano air vehicle program. Unlike the ornithopter we saw in July, this vehicle uses only one wing for flight. A small propeller on a rod mounted perpendicular to the wing provides rotation. The pitch of the wing is changed to climb, descend, or hover.

You can see a video of the flight tests after the break. The sound the Samara makes reminds us of classic alien invasion movies and the use of Verdi’s Requiem for the background music during flight tests (2:43) seems quite fitting. At about 5:45 there is some on board video footage that is just a blur of the room spinning by. This would be much more useful if a few frames per second were snapped at exactly the same point in the vehicles rotation.

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Roombas With UAV Brains Play Pac-Man

November 10, 2009 by Devlin Thyne 9 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JHtX2JwZAY&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

[Jack], [Cory], and [Maciej] are playing Pac-Man with Roombas on a lab floor. The Roombas are outfitted with ALIX3d2 single board computers running Gentoo and a software suite developed for UAVs at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles. The hardware and software sections are quite in-depth and make for a good read.

AWE: A Robotic Wall

November 9, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 50 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaMuS3wZ-bM]

AWE is an interesting project, where your office wall is a helpful robot. That’s the goal anyway. The wall is articulated and can reconfigure its shape to fit your needs. You can see in their video that they have come up with several specific uses for AWE at different positions. We want to like AWE, we see that there is potential there. The video hasn’t won us over, there just wasn’t enough added benefit over a simple setup like a projector mount. We think the real benefit just isn’t as obvious. When we saw the girl stand up, and the wall back away intuitively, our attention was regained. What potential uses do you guys see?

[via BotJunkie]

Another Mini KeepOn?

October 31, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

[flickr video = 4060182274]

[Eustice Scrubb] has posted some videos and pictures of a robotic “eye stalk” that he’s building. It looks like the final version is using 3 servos in an arrangement like tendons through a slinky jr. The ping-pong ball on the top has a BlinkM inside it. You can see a video after the break that shows the three servo tendons in motion. The whole thing is controlled by an Arduino and one of his pictures states that it plays mp3s and has an internal pendulum. None of his pictures seem to implicitly state what it is meant to do though.

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Single Servo Robot

October 30, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFRPZRovn74]

[Guilherme Martins] rose to a challenge to build a robot with a single servo. His robot is a puppet controller, called talkie walkie. In real time, it will move its mouth to the sound of what you are saying. For those really curious, he’s speaking Portuguese and he roughly says “Hi, how’s it going”. He’s using an Arduino with a custom sound sensor, a single servo, a box, and a folder paper mouth.

Building a single servo robot shouldn’t be that much of a challenge, we’ve even seen walking robots with a single motor. There’s this 2 legged crawler, and we recall seeing a 4 legged B.E.A.M. walker with a single servo, but can’t find it right now.

[via RobotsDreams]