robot

1024 Articles

Newest Hardware Bounty, The Open Lidar Project

November 17, 2010 by 29 Comments

Inspired by the successful Kinect bounty put out by Adafruit, [gallamine] of the RobotBox community has posted his own $200 $400 bounty for the first person who can hack the scanning LIDAR from Neato Robotic’s XV-11 vacuumbot. This sensor would be particularly useful to any robotic makers out there, because even the full retail price of the vacuum is less than the cost of most standalone LIDAR units, which often run upwards of $1000. The bounty seems to be growing every day, starting out at $200, and doubling thanks to a couple of other interested parties.

Luckily, from what we hear, the sensor was never made to be hack-proof (and perhaps even secretly hack friendly?), seeing as one of the prime developers of the sensor is a member of a certain Home Brew Robotics Club. We love it when companies are nice to hackers, and we hope to see more examples of this in the future. Not sure what the XV-11 is? Be sure to check out the video after the break for info about the vacuum and its scanning LIDAR.

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Stupid Friggin’ Robots

November 12, 2010 by 4 Comments

 

Some robots aspire to greatness, revolutionizing our humanoid behaviour in ways we struggle to understand. They have traveled in space, photographing the stars like celestial paparazzi or snatching Martians up like interplanetary bed intruders. Some robots are happy to perform their everyday functions with dignity and grace, scrubbing our floors and thanking us for recycling.

It may seem that every robot has a calling that–whether grandiose or humble–makes it a valuable part of our society. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Some robots use our hard-earned energy resources to no good use, lazing around without a useful function, drinking flux and tonic all night while watching reruns of Lost in Space. They are stupid robots.

Many humans look upon such pitiful automatons as nothing more than flotsam in the whitewater rapids of human achievement, but the more empathetic among us are ready to celebrate the unique uselessness of stupid robots in grand style. Enter Bacarobo (translated), the premier event showcasing the quirkiest and most amusingly useless robots of our time.

This year the contest was held at the end of October, and the entrants were hilarious to say the least. The dancing olé-bot drew much applause, while the shivering toque robots wooed the crowd in a desperate attempt to escape their frigid prison. It will be fun to see whether any stupidly adorable robot designs will come out of our own Santa-bot competition, considering the source material. If you’ve ever built a stupid or useless robot (accidentally or not) please share your story in the comments. Sometimes the most endearing things about our technology are the parts that don’t work the way they’re supposed to.

ROS Turns Three

November 9, 2010 by 4 Comments

Turtles!

Since its first debut three years ago, ROS has been gaining some popularity with the robotics folks.  It’s behind the scenes of those impressive quadcopters you may remember from a while back.  ROS helps abstract the lower level functions of a robot by supplying lots of code for commonly used components (wiimote for example). Being an “operating system”  it comes with lots of nice features you would expect, like a package manager.  It’s open source and many of their projects are well documented making it easy get started.

Check out the video after the break to see it in action Continue reading “ROS Turns Three” →

Robot Eyes Look Where You Do

November 5, 2010 by 35 Comments

This robot eye can move five times faster than the human eye. It’s capable of being used to follow a human gaze and, as you can see by that coin, it’s small enough to be used in pairs. When used to follow your gaze it needs a custom-made eye tracker. The thought here is that a lot can be learned about a person’s psyche by monitoring what they are focusing on. But we wonder about the augmented reality properties of a setup like this.

Imagine a pair of glasses as a heads up display. If this camera knows where you’re looking it can process the items in your gaze and overlay digital information. As with all new technology there are obvious military uses for this, but we’d be more interested in a Flickr pool type collection of people’s real-world experiences. Like subscribing to the locations of that thumb drive network in NYC and having the camera/glasses guide you to the nearest installation.

Want to see how fast this thing responds? Check out the video after the break.

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We Knew We Were Doomed When The T-shirt Cannon Bots Showed Up

October 28, 2010 by 14 Comments

The newest addition to the Skynet armada is this 10-barrel t-shirt cannon. It’s capable of storming the battlements at over twelve feet per second with a firing rate of three T-shirts per second (ooh, is that cotton?).

The members of Team 254, which is hosted by Bellarmine College Preparatory School, built the robot over the summer. This involved a full production cycle; planning, 3D modelling, acquiring the materials, and finishing the build. All of this is well documented in their build blog and for video, check out their media page.

We already know how to customize the T-shirts for use as ammo, now what this needs is some tank treads.

Robot Gripper Uses Coffee To Pick Up Anything

October 26, 2010 by 35 Comments

Picking up a raw egg is not something we’d think a robot gripper would be good at. But this model uses a bulbous tip instead of claw, which makes crushing the object less of a concern.

That tip is kind of like a balloon. It is stretched full with coffee grounds but air can also be pumped in and sucked out. When it comes time to grip an object, a bit of air is pumped in and the bulb is pressed down on its target. Once in place all of the air is sucked out, locking the coffee grounds around the object. Take a look after the break to see just how many things can be gripped with this technique.

Now the real question, can it bring me a beer?

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Fully Customized Robots

October 25, 2010 by 8 Comments

i.materialise, a custom 3D printing fabrication house are looking for talented robotics enthusiasts with the skills to design custom robotics parts such as functional frames, decorative shells, as well as unique parts required by robots to look and perform their best. The best part? They are offering free 3D printing of parts to the people they select with the most interesting or useful ideas. Make sure you check out their blog for details on what they are looking for and how to enter, as well as checking out some of the other cool things they do, such as a fully customizable 3D printed frisbee. Let us know what you design, we would love to show it off!

[via Robots-Dreams]