We feel the need to apologize immediately for the use of Yakkity Sax in the preceding video and recommend you watch the longer, yak free, video below. It shows researchers at the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory teaching a robot how to make a ham and cheese omelet. Each working area and food item is labeled with a machine recognizable tag. The researcher demonstrates the task by guiding the robot’s hand. The robot combines multiple demonstrations to generalize the skill. It can then adapt the learned skill to the specific task. You can see this in the video when the robot adjusts to the location of the bowl and cutting board when they’re moved around. Teaching through demonstration would make the use of robotics much easier for the general population.
Robots Hacks2445 Articles
Modular Reconfigurable On The Fly Robot Demo
[Erik] Sent in this modular robot video. It’s not as mentally disturbing as the snake robots we featured before, but it’s still pretty cool. It looks like it’s using M-TRAN modules. Details are completely lacking, so if you’ve got some, share ’em.
Voice Controlled Wheel Chair
[Amnon] sent in this demo of his groups voice controlled wheel chair. I couldn’t find any details, but sometimes just a demo is enough to find some new inspiration. They connected a hm2007 speech recognition kit to an Innovation FIRST controller board on an electric wheel chair chasis. Additional sensors detect stairs and other obstacles.
Swarm Robotics
Uber-geek [James McLurkin] was in Austin recently demoing his robot swarm. He’s on tour with EDA Tech Forum. [McLurkin] has multiple degrees from the MIT AI lab and worked at iRobot for a couple of years. Lately, he has been working on distributed robot computing: robot swarms.
[McLurkin] was an entertaining speaker and had an interesting view of robotics. He is optimistic that robot parts will become more modular, so it will be easier to build them, and more importantly, faster to design them.
Some quotes:
- “There’s more sensors in a cockroach’s butt than any robot”
- “12 engineer years to design, 45 minutes to build”
- “If it can break your ankle, it’s a real [rc] car.”
Teach Your Robots To Cook
The nitty gritty details are a little bit hidden, but [Sylvain]’s work is awesome enough that I just don’t care. He’s been doing research on robot learning with some tasty results. After all, who doesn’t want a robot to make breakfast for em? He’s taken the time to publish some source code, so robot made breakfast isn’t that far out of reach. mmmm.
Maker Faire 2008: SWARM
SWARM is a large scale kinetic art project. The electrically powered spheres move by shifting the batteries around the center axle. By tilting the central ring, th orb can steer as well. The SWARM members are currently radio controlled, but the plan is for them to eventually receive commands from a mother node. More information about the orbs’ design is available on the project wiki. A video of the wobbly buggers in motion is embedded after the break.
Li-ion For Your Roomba
[gim] gutted some li-ion laptop batteries to replace his roomba’s battery pack. He had to pick up a li-ion charger and add a protection circuit to deal with the li-ion cells, but ended up with a new lighter pack for his roomba. If you head this way, the protection circuit is a vital component to prevent fires/explisions/etc. Looks like a great resource for robot power or even R/C projects.
