robotic

30 Articles

Re-purpose Industrial Robotic Arms

September 7, 2010 by 53 Comments

We must find out where you can acquire these industrial robots pictured above. Sure, you expect car companies like BMW to have a few lying around, which they used to make into a Twitter message writing robot. But Bungie, a video game company, to have one as part of an advertisement for Reach?

The former is just a scratch on the surface, with some pictures, but a much more decent writeup will be provided after September 12th. The latter has a few videos, and you can watch it recreate a monument with light ‘live’. And while both are impressive uses of old tech, neither answered our first question, we gotta get us one of these.

[Thanks Matt and FurryFriend]

Robotic Chess Opponent

April 14, 2010 by 22 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkGqn5rNzK8]

[Dennis] is using a robotic arm as a chess opponent. Rather than using an under-board movement system, a Lynxmotion AL5A robotic arm plucks each piece and moves it to the next space. He tells us that he’s using a Python script that he created to process the moves and decide what’s next. That must mean he’s using a webcam to capture the location of the pieces on the board. About half way through you can see the robot run into one of the pawns. We’d like to know if he has problems with picking up the pieces as the game progresses and they get further away from the center of each square. From what we can see, looks like a great job!