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Phototropic Solar-powered Robots
timbong writes "Have you ever wanted a small, cheap robot that you could build for about $20? (depending on whether you buy new/scrap parts and what motors you use) Then check out this tutorial it requires some soldering experience but it really isn't very hard. If you want a kit check out solarbotics, they have some interesting stuff like walking analog adaptive robots."
Worse, it claimed to be able to charge up and then go; the idea being that you set it in a brighly lit room, and the motor would go every so often (and if it were incorporated into a robot, it would move). Unfortunately, I never seemed to be able to get it to charge off of anything less bright than a 300W Halogen bulb! For whatever reason (and I don't recall enough electronics from school to debug it) it did not seem to *ever* go in a lit room, even sun lit.
This is not to say that Solarbotics are bad or you shouldn't be interested, etc. But if you're a complete duffer when it comes to electronics, you might be better off with a Mindstorms kit.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Now I will not have to find light on my own. The advancements of modern science truly amaze me.
But seriously folks, it always struck me that roboticists have made phototropic robots because it was easy to do, and it made the robots seem as if they were intelligent - not because because there was any sort of practicality in the end result.
-josh
A robot is a machine that can adapt its behavior to achieve its goals.
That's an interesting distinction to make, and clearly a valuable one in some cases, but it's certainly not a fundamental definition of a robot. Even Kapek's original robotniks didn't have that much freedom of behaviour. Few robots even have the concept of goal-oriented behaviour, let alone choosing behaviours to achieve it. Much of the interesting current work in robotics is focussed on robots built as nodes with minimal inherent behaviours and the behaviour of the system as a whole arises as their combination, not by designing from a top-down concept.
Tilden's is one of the best interviews in the book Robo sapiens. He's hilarious! The book is a series of one and two page interviews with a large (~50) number of researchers in different areas of robotics. The book is aimed at laypeople, so don't be disappointed if it's not techie enough for you. It's worth it for the awesome photographs. It gets four out of five stars at Amazon (9 reviews).
Check out:
Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species (Amazon Link)
If you watch TV news, you know less about the world than if you just drank gin straight from the bottle.
Turns out that these robots are both phototrophic, or photovores as the website calls them, and phototropic, just like plants. Given the potential for confusion between phototrophic and phototropic, using photovore is probably a very good idea.
Depending on the size and the extra features (speakers, cattleprods, whatever), just the thing to scare the heck out of the neighborhood dogs.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
except that sony are whores of the highest order - so 'F' the AIBO and their bi-ped.
Anyone remember the "we'll block them at the isp, we'll block them at the servers, we'll block them in their own computers" speech?
What _I_ want is the "Dragonfly" from Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy. Very small, could transmit audio and video AND haptic feedback. Could fly anywhere, and I beleive it was solar powered (phototrophic?). The proverbial "fly on the wall".
:)
A couple of years back a friend almost had me beleiving that audio surveillance was the key to succesful relationship with women... if I'd had the budget and knowhow to get the proper gear, I might have tried it.
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I'm intrigued - can you repeat his thinking/reasoning for this? (I could guess at a few possible reasons, but now I'm curious :-)
The idea: you need to be able to observe the state of her take on the relationship without changing it. The only way to do that is to get a close informant or bug them.
This way, you can know where you stand. If she's wavering, you push a little more and differently, and then back off (applying the "advance-and-retreat" principle). If she's really interested, you know, and can do whatever you'd do in that case. If she's not interested at all, you stop wasting time, because lots of women won't tell you.
It's sortof "The Rules"-esque gone techno-geek/intelligence/surveillance/psycho.
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
My wife gave me the Solarbotics Solarspeeder for Christmas. I wanted an AIBO, but, finances being what they are, the ~$20 solar speeder was just fine, plus I had the fun of putting it together.
The speeder doesn't do much of anything, when left on the floor, if the sun hits it it will zoom off after the capacitor charges. However, it was a lot of fun to build... I had never soldered before (though I had seen it done hundreds of times at work).
In building the robot (if you can call it that), I learned alot about BEAM robotics. It makes a lot of sense that higher order intelligence can come from a large number of simple entities. Take a look at an ant colony or a bee hive sometime.
I imagine that someday, nanobots, because of their size will use the simple, self-organizing principles of BEAM robotics to create the intelligence desired.
Can I get one of these robots to go in to work for me? Man, its too early for this geek to be up on a Monday.
When I was in High School and early college, (20+ years ago) Radio Shack had these project books using transistors and early IC's (remember the ubiquitous 555 timer, and the IC op-amp?).
About that time, I sent away for a book I found in a catalog entitled something like 'How to Build a Robotic Pet' It was a thick book and covered everything from motive power to sensory circuits. The brain was based around a 6800 (no, I didn't leave off a 0) and was programmed in straight hex.
I never actually built this robot, but it taught me quite a bit, just thinking about building it and making improvements on it with more modern technology.
Radio Shack sells very few of the component level stuff any more, things that filled my High School day dreams: resistors, capacitors, diodes, triacs, breadboards and basic IC components like 555 timers, op-amps and flip flops. Is this component level understanding of electronics going away? I made some nifty little things, such as a burglar alarm using a triac, some resistors and a photocell, hooked up to a chirper circuit made from a 555 timer and an IC amplifier.
Mark has been doing this for quite a while. He was showing them off on a college tour in 1994 when we saw him at MIT. If your cable system carries it, there's been a special running on Discovery Science that includes this stuff that's worth the watch
These BEAM robots - among them the featured one - are in most cases nonprogrammable, hardwired machines like photovores. While small, simple robots have a certain fascination, quite a number of them are extremely "dumb" (because hardwired). It can be quite a lot of fun to work with these, though.
Pitsco sells solar panels that can power the Mindstorms Motors. Unfortunately, they can't power the RCX + motors. Check out:
http://www.pitsco.com.
Get the Pitsco Catalog. It has tons of Lego stuff, as well as do-it-yourself supplies.
You can make proximity detectors with the flex sensors sold by Pitsco. They're the same sensors as in the Nintendo Glove Controllers. For more info on homebrew Lego stuff go to Mike Gasperi's Homebrew Sensors page:
http://www.plazaearth.com/usr/gasperi/lego.htm.
If you watch TV news, you know less about the world than if you just drank gin straight from the bottle.
The title should probably use "Phototrophic" (literally "light-eating", deriving its energy from light; from the Greek "photos" for light and "trophein" for "to eat") instead of "phototropic" (meaning "seeking the light"). Plants are phototrophic when they use photosynthesis to make food, and they are phototropic when they grow to turn their leaves in the direction of the sun.
I follow (more or less) Mark Tilden's work for about 6 years already. What you probably do not realize is that he pretty much solved the problem of modeling insects (insects are automata unlike mammals). In this respect all these LEGO robots (or any other CPU/code based robots) do not even remotely approach the the ingeniously (means - simply) designed creaters. I recommend everybody to pay attention to this invention, this is the only known to me example of getting inside the complex system of brain with not yet recognized consequences for the neurotechnology.