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um, just checking... do they look anything like this?

TriWheel designs were used in the movie damnation alley. While they will take stairs - in an active approach, they are very difficult to implement - I know, I have done so. Mind you - they also can work as (rather innefective) water paddles. Have a read of this Orionrobots on Tri-Star Wheels. The good thing about the jBot design, is it is passive and still acheives it. I do own Bonanza by the way - it is a very good resource.

It Reminds me of The Replicators in Stargate-SG1 while they lack the ability to replicate them self from the surrounding materials they are Swarming nanobots which come together to make larger devices

http://orionrobots.co.uk/tiki-index.php?page=Starg ate+-+The+Replicators

Most likely NASA employees have been watching large amounts of television and claiming it was research then had to develop something as to satisfy their managers that watching stargate was really Research :P

but while you may think it seems unlikely that someone would go about creating machines based on something seen in a sci-fi series its not the first time this has happened as many of the inventions in James bond films inspired scientists and were later developed for use by real spies

Are there any robotics building and hobbyist clubs in canada?
OrionRobots would love to link up with Canadian counterparts.

Is it me - or are there a lot of canadian robots coming up?
I think I am going to have to start writing entries for all these in the Robot Knowledge Center.

How many robot building slashdotters are there out there?

I think I should challenge the OrionRobots people to build one. We could have a pool tournament in the local Mr Q's in East Finchley.

This will be an interesting challenge. I can already see many different designs, ones on legs, ones on wheels - or even ones on rails around the table - though I mighty disallow the rails...

The nice thing about a pool table is that you have bright coloured balls ona distinctive green (or blue in some cases) background. This makes it a little easier for working things out. A robot may be able to crane over the table with its camera, and then project trajectories.

Of course- these Candian guys would be welcome to the challenge!

Anyone with any other ideas for robot challenges could propose them at our Challenge Proposal Forum.

And yes - I am a total robot geek!

I think I should challenge the OrionRobots people to build one. We could have a pool tournament in the local Mr Q's in East Finchley.

This will be an interesting challenge. I can already see many different designs, ones on legs, ones on wheels - or even ones on rails around the table - though I mighty disallow the rails...

The nice thing about a pool table is that you have bright coloured balls ona distinctive green (or blue in some cases) background. This makes it a little easier for working things out. A robot may be able to crane over the table with its camera, and then project trajectories.

Of course- these Candian guys would be welcome to the challenge!

Anyone with any other ideas for robot challenges could propose them at our Challenge Proposal Forum.

And yes - I am a total robot geek!

REPLICATORS! AHHHHH!

Would be an mobile graffiti removing bot - a mobile bot, able to cope with urban landscapes, and with a long telescoping arm.
When instructed to remove graffiti from a wall - it will either try and use water/sand or detergent cannons to blast it off(paint remover?). Or the other possibility is to paint over it.

If the robot is painting over it, the robot could either be supplied with the right paint, or given the primaries, plus black and white, and use a color sensor to determine a pantone for the colors and mix the paint accordingly.

Later on this evening - I will add a report on this artical on OrionRobots with details on basic colour sensing gear...

I think I have spent more of my income on lego now, than would have been spent on a child by a parent. In fact as a robot builder, I recommend lego as a robot prototyping tool. It is also a wonderful toy.

Sadly, because of the decline in set quality, although I bought the mindstorms set, pretty much most of my purchases post '99 are older sets from ebay.. If my local toy store had proper technic sets(with more than just liftarms - I liked technic beams), and not just the Bionacle/Slizer range - then I would be purchasing much more new Lego.

The only good thing to come out of bionacle was the Manas set - which with the right sneakiness can be controlled via IR from the RCX. I did have an artical on OrionRobots about that somewhere...

But then half the fun, and electronics learning has come from people trying to expand these limitations in some way. While the RCX is not the most advanced microcontroller out there for building robots, it certainly has some of the most interesting and innovative systems.

I agree that the bubblegum programming system is limited - and I recommend learning NQC asap, but I have created a couple of custom sensors based upon stuff I found on the web and my own research. After all - if you can use one input to create a differential light source sensor, then you can use a similar sensor on a 4 input PIC and get much more out of it.

Sadly the spybotics is the most limited one - as without hacking the brick to peices, you cannot extend its sensors. Well you could... Using some PIC with a clever VLL board and program - but then you may as well use the PIC instead entirely.

Btw - any links to the museum? I had a look at your site - and your work with the contest is probably worth a mention on Orionrobots.

The pity is that while Bionacle and some of the specialised themed sets went away from this, the Mindstorms sets fired the creative side of lego furthar. The amount of creative thought poured out from Mindstorms users is unbeleivable. Indeed it was mindstorms that brought me back to being a Lego user - all my old lego was destroyed by my sisters after I moved out and left it behind..

It only bionacle had used fairly standard technic bricks - it would have been more of an asset. Moulding lots of custom bricks is not the way to have gone.

Lego still is the perfect toy - and having the normally compatible technic and basic lego go back to roots would be great. The current range of technic sets is right down. The designer and inventor sets are great.

What I really want to do now, is establish OrionRobots as an education organisation in some way so we can order Dacta.

Isaac Asimov took the principle of beaming suns energy back to earth as high energy lasers for granted in at least a few of his stories. In one of his most notable stories,"Reason" , a robot even has other robots worshipping a component of such a station as if it was some kind of Deity.

I assume you mean Bob Shaw - an author mentioned three or four posts above.

The implications of that are interesting. But I think controlling and temporarily holding light beams could lead to some seriously interesting optical devices.

Imagine using the technology to build an optical logic gate system(I dont mean the quantum ones - I mean just gated light). I suspect the concept has been covered - and there are probably good reasons why we dont have not adopted systems based on this as opposed to electronic ones.

Anyone care to enlighten me on this? This kind of thing is very relevant to OrionRobots.