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It's not ballistic missiles that the US military is worried about. Build a robotic plane big enough to carry a nuke, navigate using GPS.

Hey, Congressmen: No amount of legislation would stop this.

i think i read that ordinary bomb-crew robots carry either a gun or a water-gun to induce explosion in potential bombs.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the goal of the gun/water-gun is to demolish the workings of the bomb (e.g. the timer/transmitter/etc) so that the bomb doesn't explode.

Using Bomb Disrupters in Demining Operations
Robots Make Bomb Disposal Safer

It seems that somebody already successfully sent a model plane across the atlantic
and ,
although I don't know what "under FAI rules" means.

So now, terrorists can target most places in the world pretty safely. I wonder if this scenario has been taken into account by the Pentagon and what they can do about it.

The way that AI is headed, I think that there may be robots that will be able to to menial work, e.g. cook, clean, build, etc. I don't think that AI will become an actual intelligence for some time.

An artifical intelligence is able to invent new things is something that may take much longer.

Although, I think that some researchers have realize what it is that made humans want to leard; Physical and Emotional needs. For all we know one of these needs driven robots could develop a more advanced intelligence than humans.

• Kismet
• Meet Kismet...
• Robot Learning Driven by Emotions
• AGI Project Phase-Overview
• Emotional and Intelligent: The Tangled Knot of Cognition

After realising that its customers didn't know what bending function went with what computer function, Sony has decided to include a tutorial. Instead of the cheap, easy method of displaying pictures on the screen, they have used artifical muscles to bend the necessary bits of the computer.

In order to provide a more useful function, the mini computers have a screen-saver mode that can optionally bend the computer when it is not busy. Sony innovators figured that strange movements in people's pockets have either become accepted, or been ignored completely in the past.

No, I think he's describing the SlugBot

These guys are following a long tradition (in technology years) of soccer-playing robots.

From this article:

"This year's challenge was to build soccer-playing robots. An unfortunate choice perhaps, given the possibility of confusion between RoboCon and RoboCup. The latter is another Japanese-inspired initiative, whose goal is also to build soccer-playing robots (Australasian, 30 August 1997). But there are clear differences between the two. RoboCon is based on mechanics, whereas RoboCup is more electrical, being mainly to do with communications and software. Also RoboCup robots are completely autonomous. (RoboCon robots) are remote controlled."

Okay, maybe a few basic hardware References, HI-LED, Breadboard, and Chip Products links would help.

Reference - AtariArchives Electronic Computer Projects
Reference - Electronic Circuit Guidebook Sensors
Reference - Robot Building For Beginners
Global Specialties Breadboards
Eductional Kits USA including LED kits
High Intensity (HI) LED Source Discrete LEDs, LED Panel Mount Lamps, Based LED Lamps, SMT LEDs, PCB LEDs
RF Digital Corporation HI-LED White Red Yellow Blue Green
National Semiconductor Chip Products Catalog National Semiconductor Products
PMC-Sierra Chip Products Product Directory
R.T.Nollet, Chip Products, Australia

There you go; it should be enough to get you started on the hardware. Others that are far better at software can help with some of the required programming resources. If you can afford an old logic analyzer (maybe 8/16-pin, at surplus stores) for the I/O buses they can help you optimize your code. Years ago, (when I did) I would have used, an appropriate Hex/Machine code to do a small project like this. If you and a couple colleagues/friends succeed at this level ... the lessons you teach yourselves and experience obtained will be significant ... not many universities teach at this "wide-concept" "Master-O-None, Jack-O-All" level anymore. Very few Geeks under 40 years old (I believe) would be able to do what you are thinking about even less if they have a college degree that pushed them into a "high pay/viz" specialty at a young fragile age.

OldHawk777

Reality is a self-induced hallucination.

Yet another robot lawn mower

I don't know why it is, but the moment American media gets hold of something, it turns it into bland, flavorless mush. Is it really so hard to come up with a half hour of entertaining television, devoid of filler?

Um, the Americans had this before the UK. Biohazard astounded the crowd by self-righting, a full two years before Rex's legendary backflip. Blendo tore opponents to shreds long before Hypnodisc came up with an inferior implementation of the flywheel weapon.

I think the main reason UK Robot Wars is so good as regards the action / bullshit ratio is that we have so _many_ robots to get through. There's simply no time for filler material. Anyone with a bit of mechanical ability can knock together a robot, and getting it down to London is hardly a transcontinental commute.

Personally, I just want to get hold of a video of Razer on Battlebots. Their website brags like mad about that.

A modchip is usually a PIC or ASIC programmed/designed to be used as a hardware "patch" for mass-produced hardware.

what it does,

The original Sony Playstation popularised them; they were used to defeat the copy protection used on Playstation games whereby extra sectors were included on the CD that were unreadable by non-Playstation CD drives. The modchip intercepted the protection check and spoofed the Playstation BIOS into believing a copied disc with missing protection sectors was legitimate.

and how are you supposed to install it (do you need to make your own pcb for a daughtercard, do you need to unsolder something and then solder this in place), etc.?

It (potentially) varies from modchip to modchip, but these things are designed to be installed by (almost) Joe or Josephine Public, so typically it's just a case of soldering some wires from pins on the modchip to specific points on an unmodified motherboard. Sometimes these are the legs of ICs (fiddly), sometimes actual tracks (fairly fiddly) but in this case, it's "vias" - the small circular solder pads that link different layers of a PCB (many PCBs are 4+ layers these days, both for reasons of size and to improve their radio emission and acceptance characteristics).

For the record, I have never owned a console or a console game (nor obviously pirated any) but I am interested to know what hack value consoles have in general and in this case Xbox.

The potential here is an easy way to bypass Microsoft's "only boot purchased game DVDs" protection and use modified Xbox consoles to boot copied DVDs or even home-made discs, such as Linux or *BSD.

--

I've actually been doing more hobby stuff lately. Having more disposable income than your average kid makes a difference. Another difference nowadays is the greater variety of cool gadgets available and the Internet for obtaining them. I actually took time out of my busy weekend to build a flashlight out of super-magnets, some copper wire, and a couple white LEDs. To see the plans, look here. Next weekend, I think I'll do something with muscle wire. Oh, and those 100 ball bearings I just won on eBay, just wait and see...

I have worked on physics models for atmospheric effects in a flight sim for the Kitty Hawk project. There are a lot of issues surrounding flying a plane on mars, but it is not much different.

The biggest obstacle (and one in which I haven't read yet.. so I'm posting) is the differences in speed of sound. People say, "Get bigger wings" and "fly faster" unfortunately this doesn't work as well as would be expected. You basically have to design your plane to fly super-sonic when it is travelling roughly 180 knotts (Martial sea level vs. earth equiv is around 100K feet, reduction in speed of sound..don't remember the exact numbers -- this was years ago that I worked on the project)

This isn't the easiest of tasks, but, they did it. - the major obstacle the project faced (we did the sim, as show in the picture - CMEX did all the "real" work) faced was efficient fuel. The final engine was Hydrazine powered, as the whole plane had to be exceptionally light weight and cover a large stretch of valles marineris.

Anyway, it's been designed for years now... hope you found my drivel interesting.

And yes, it is cool to work at NASA.

And to think that Halloween is just around the corner. If you have enough of them, do they try to "collect" larger floating particles [smile]?

Side Note, Intertran is also decent as an online translator.

and here's a nice list of various robot competitions

• Navigating Mobile Robots: Systems and Technologies
• "Where am I? Systems and Methods for Mobile Robot Positioning" (more recent than above)
• U of Florida's LawnNibbler
• Robotics Companies list
• "Can't Anyone Make a Decent Robot?"

Having seen stories about robot mowers in the past, I revisited them to see how they accomplish this. This one uses a perimeter wire to tell the mower it's hit the boundary, plus onboard sensors to sense obstacles. Same for this one. I did a number of google searches for robot position sensing and didn't come up with anything that would represent a drop-in solution. Some folks are experimenting with visual clues, others with mathematical means to 'estimate' position (I don't know about you, but no mower of mine is going to figure out where it is by 'estimating'), while others are experimenting with sonar. I suspect that you aren't going to find a commercial product that will allow the accurate positioning you're after, at least not at the price goal you've set. Looks like you'll have to be a pioneer. Good luck.

http://www.robotbooks.com/plastic-muscles.htm

Basically it just had a bait to atract the slugs into the battery and then every few days in would move a 2 or 3 metres into a new area in the hope that there would be more slugs there. I can't find any links - does anyone else know of this?

If you really want to know how to build autonomous robots, there are several competitions with the same level of excitement as Battlebots et al, but with the added benefit that you can imagine it might eventually be a good thing to turn the resulting machines loose in the real world.

For instance, Robot Sumo is quite popular in Japan and the US. You can find the rules and links to competitions at Sine Robotics. Another big competition is the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Home Robot Contest, wherein robots navigate a known maze (a model house floorplan) to put out a fire (simulated by a lit candle).

Another nice thing about these competitions is they can be cheaper to get into than Battlebots (less heavy iron and welding). And there are lots of good people and organizations who can help you climb the learning curve. Just a few of my favorites are the Seattle Robotics Society, The Robotics Club of Yahoo, Raleigh Triangle Amateur Robotics Group, Portland Area Robotics Society, Robotics Society of Southern CA, and the San Francisco Robotics Society of America.

Finally, here's a few places you can find parts, books, plans, kits, and lots of links: Mondo-Tronics, Acroname, and Robot Books.com.

the HC11 is a *great* uC. it allows you to build simple robotics with nothing more than a coupla resistors, motors and clock circuit you ignorant twat. have a look at the books pictures on : http://www.robotbooks.com/advanced-robotics.htm..i t'll give you some clues about the HC11.

Slugbot does.