News: Mod old cell phones into robot spiders
Arachnophilia and technosexuals rejoice. This whimsical, skittering robot takes only 5 minutes of tinkering.
Arachnophilia and technosexuals rejoice. This whimsical, skittering robot takes only 5 minutes of tinkering.
The light sensor on a Lego Mindstorms NXT robot can be used to help the robot navigate obstacles or follow light sources. Learn how to program light sensors and the calibration program in the Lego Mindstorms NXT robotics system using movement blocks within the NXT programming environment. Program the light sensor on a Lego Mindstorms robot.
If you want your Lego Mindstorms NXT robot to function as accurately as possible youneed to understand how to get data from the viewing sensors via the NXT brick. Learn how to use the NXT brick and the NXT programming environment to view and change light, sound, or touch sensor data on a Lego Mindstorms Robot. View sensor data from a Lego Mindstorms NXT robot.
Local YMCAs: CRENSHAW FAMILY YMCA
What would it be like to have a super-realistic humanoid modeled after you...and then come face-to-face with the moving, life-like version of yourself... Creepy? To say the least.
PETA wouldn't consider James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau's ingenious flypaper clock very eco-friendly, but I might beg to differ. The clock doesn't require any electricity or batteries. Instead it captures flies and converts the bodies of the dead insects into energy. Eight dead flies makes for roughly twelve days of power. Not bad.
Careful or you may find yourself crushing on this cute little Android named HRP-4C. From the head up, the Japanese robot could easily be mistaken for one of her human backup singers. Freaky! Previously, Robot Dance Off Gets Creepy.
Though named "Walker," this robot doesn't really ambulate so much as shimmy. Which, to tell the truth, is fine by us. Lots of gross things walk. Only cute things dance.
This simple yet odd robot moves like a four-legged, single unit of a centipede, which unfortunately makes me think of the Human Centipede (shudder, don't click on the second video in the gallery below if you're faint of heart... or at work).
This year's FOOMA International Food Machinery and Technology Exhibition had a few robots I wouldn't mind hanging around my kitchen. The sushi-bot's hand is amazing... if only it could make the sushi, not just transport it. Oh well. There's always next year.
This robot hasn't levitated any humans yet (especially not pictured Days of Our Lives star Deidre Hall), but it looks like the sky may be the limit with the Robo-Air Jet System.
As November was coming to an end this year, the "6th Robo-One Gate in International Robot Exhibition 2009" dance competition took place. The contenders are just a little bit creepy, to say the least. Particularly exhibit A, Britney Spears wannabe, "LOVE & JOY, Yuhi Kimura", by Doka Harumi.
Remember Big Dog? Or Big Dog's counterpart, Little Dog? Well, Boston Dynamics has added a new member to their creepily-moving-calvary.
Hell, yeah! Play with your food. This android hand is the brainchild of a collaboration including Robo250, the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, the Mattress Factory and MAYA Design, Inc.
Sweden's Hans Andersson, has a new way of solving both the Rubik's Cube and Sudoku puzzles... ROBOTS. That's right, memorizing lengthy algorithms or racking your brain with numbers is no longer required to solve these perplexing puzzles.
Hiroshi Ishiguro is at it again, but this time "it" has a winning smile. Japanese researchers have developed a humanoid robot that can laugh and smile, mimicking a real person's facial expressions. The android, called Geminoid F, is modeled after a woman in her twenties, with long black hair, silicone skin and lifelike teeth.
The war against machines is near, thanks to Cyberdyne... I mean... the German Aerospace Center. The DLR Hand Arm System is a terminator-like anthropomorphic appendage that functions just as a normal human hand and arm would. Only it's way more durable and can take a beating from not only a hammer, but a baseball bat. Possibly the next-gen soldier?
In the wealthy oil man's world of Arabian camel racing, the tradition of using child jockeys has been replaced with the use of small robo-jockeys in recent years. But after finally ridding the game of the mistreatment of children, the sport is now under scrutiny again. The Dubai police have discovered a new feature illegally added to the torturous, whip-endowed robots: hidden stun guns.
Programming a Lego Mindstorms robot to do more than just move continuously involves using the wait block within the NXT programming environment.. Learn how to use wait blocks to program your robot to respond to certain conditions including touch and sound. Program wait blocks in the Lego Mindstorms NXT system.
Relax PETA, it's not as evil as it looks (although those neural electrode implants do look painful).
One of the greatest things about the internet? Free papercraft downloads. Enjoy Botropolis' collection of 50 fun robots. Just download, print, and assemble. My top ten favorites below. Wall-E. Robocop. Optimus Prime. R2-D2. The Terminator. Poseable Toy Robot. Retro Bot. Godzilla. Poco Bot with 6 rotation points. Robot Owl.
This is just one example of how PVC can be used as a prototyping material for robot designers.
Rovio's highly successful Angry Birds game has generated a slew of wannabe Angry Clones and dominated nearly every device and platform known to man—iPhone, Android, PSP, Xbox 360, Windows—and now, for the first time it's available for play directly on the web (for free). It was specifically designed for Google's Chrome OS and their new Chromebook line of laptop computers, but can play on any device in almost any web browser (like Firefox).
The da Vinci robot has proven to be an endless source of amusement to surgeons everywhere; in Japan, it folds origami cranes, at the state of Washington's Swedish Medical Center, it flies paper airplanes and gives manicures. It's a battle of the hospitals—who can make their pricey pony perform the greatest trick?
Holy… Lord, help us all—this isn't CG, it's for real. Meet Geminoid DK, the latest spawn from Osaka University Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro's legion of ultra-realistic Androids.
What happens when a bunch of Bollywood filmmakers unleash their imagination with the aid of Maya and After Effects (plus lots and lots of paisas)? The sci-fi flick Enthiran (Robot), the most expensive Indian film ever produced.
If you fancy yourself a nomad, check out Walking House, a mobile and modular dwelling system that is pneumatically powered, all-terrain ready. The vehicle-home crawls along at a snail's pace of 60 meters per hour, which equates to less than 1/2 a mile per hour. Akin in concept to the rolling house-on-the-go (except in the way cooler insect-like robot form), Walking House also boasts some cool eco-friendly features:
This NXT Mindstorm LEGO robot can actually walk on a treadmill. Quite an amazing feet.
A Merry Christmas robot medley of song and dance, courtesy of Bot Junkie.
Real life transformer, OmniZero, can climb a ladder, perform somersaults, jump rope, crack eggs, battle other robots, and best of all, carry a person. Witness all of these actions of the various OmniZero prototypes in the video gallery below.
The web's favorite robotics company, MIT's Boston Dynamics, never fails to instill truly animal-like qualities into its famed creations. We giggled (slightly guiltily) when poor Big Dog took a tumble on the ice. Now as we watch Little Dog climb, cautious as a puppy, and subsequently drop, exhausted, at the end of each run, we can't help but anthropomorphize Big Dog's counterpart. Previously, Robot Dog Prepares for World Domination.
Augmented reality has an incredible way of integrating things into our world that we can typically only see in movies like ghosts in a haunted house or Sharknados. However, a new experiment made with Apple's ARKit has changed the game in realistic augmented reality characters.
Motoman the Robot uses a 3D vision system to assemble LEGOs. "Motoman’s high resolution color cameras and object recognition make picking out and connecting LEGO pieces easy...he’s able to get the pieces with one hand while assembling the LEGOs with the other. "
Sandia National Laboratories of New Mexico has developed the Precision Urban Hopper, a robot that uses one powerful leg to propel itself over barriers up to twenty-five feet high.
You're never too young to start building your vast swarm of robotic minions. Taking over the world requires a whole lot of robots. The sheer volume of robots needed means your first wave will have to be made of cheap materials. After they take over key resources, you can upgrade to Kevlar and titanium. But to start, let's make popsicle stick insect robots!
This image is of my nephews cardboard robot.
The Stretta Procedure created this amazingly helpful mini dolly.
What's the geekiest way to propose to your girlfriend? Make a robot do it for you. As a self-declared dork, RangerX52 wanted to take a simple task like proposing and make it as utterly complicated as possibly—by having a DIY robot do it for him. With knowledge of his lady's infatuation with the childlike personality of GIR, one of the main characters from the animated Invader ZIM series, he went ahead and built a tiny robotic replica of GIR to do his bidding.
Here's a two-in-one "tutorial" for you today; how to fold a paper airplane, and how to execute a belated St. Patrick's Day manicure. Just follow along and do as the da Vinci does—our adroit instructor is a surgical robot, with a hefty price tag of approximately 1.3 million dollars, plus several hundred thousand dollars in annual maintenance fees. In truth, the da Vinci doesn't have the brain power to dictate the folding of a simple origami plane, nor does it know how to paint orange and green...
MultiCuber achieves another world's first: the timed relay solve of 2x2x2, 3x3x3, 4x4x4 and 5x5x5 Rubik's cubes.