The Shadow Robot Company is now offering its Dexterous Hand for public sale. The joints are powered by the company’s Air Muscles, usually in pairs to provide a variable grip. The Air Muscle is a rubber tube encased in a “Chinese finger trap” style plastic webbing. When the muscle is inflated with compressed air it contracts. This simple system results in a 400:1 power to weight ratio. The bundle of muscles required to operate the hand makes for a very large Popeye-esque forearm so we probably won’t be seeing anything humanoid based on this anytime soon. They have GPL’d control code available though so anybody that wants to start developing for this will probably have a pretty easy time. You still have to justify paying an “arm and a leg” for a hand. The site has some good movement videos for you to check out. Just don’t mimic the movements; there’s a reason robots can’t feel pain.

[via Future Feeder]

Continue reading “Shadow’s Dexterous Hand” →

you’ll have to pardon me while i wax anthropomorhpic for a moment.  why is it that robots, designed or imagined, always exist solely to fulfill a purpose or pleasure for human beings?  don’t they have feelings too?  maybe it’s about time we made some robots whose sole purpose is to hook up with other robots, get a little freaky, and make some robot progeny.

in this article we’ll be exploring robot love.  i made a couple of simple lego mindstorms robots and programmed them to reproduce — i.e. they can swap code.  effectively, two robots come together, trade their genome, die, and two new robots are born in their place.

turn up the barry white.  get out your mindstorms.  let’s get it on.

Continue reading “Sex Bots” →

grover sat alone on the shelf, placid red smile stiched across his goofy blue face.  his fabric eyed gaze never shifted.

he couldn’t see it coming.

when the knife pulled free from the back of his head, his polyester brains spilled to the floor.  only a sad smile remained.  had grover only been able to see his attacker, things may have been different.

grover the muppet — barely alive.
we can rebuild him.  we have the technology.

Continue reading “Robogrover” →

here is a great hack that stella sent to us.  mark craig pulled off a really nice looking alarm clock robosapien mod using a couple pic-micros, an lcd panel, and a text-to-speech synthesizer.  i don’t think he’s finished the breakfast-in-bed software yet, but i’ll keep my fingers crossed for an update.  nicely done!

Continue reading “Robosapien Alarm Clock” →