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Korean Bipedal Robot Kit
The Black Dragon writes "This has got to be the coolest thing I've seen in a while. It's a bipedal (walks on two legs) robot that you can put together yourself and program with movements. The site is in Korean, but from what I've been able to get from translators and currency exchange, it'll cost about $1,400. (There's a movie embedded half way down.)" Gizmodo has a blurb.
Seriously, if it wasn't for the $1000+ pricetag that'd be the hit new toy this comming xmas!
This robot reminds me a lot of the build-it-yourself Lego machines thay have been produced for a number of years now. The kits provide you with the base legos, along with motors, gears, and a nifty computer interface device that lets you write programs for a robot to execute.
The legos were a lot of fun, but the batteries for the remote/receiver never lasted that long.
This could be a nice next-generation version of the lego system, or it could turn into (brace yourself) this.
That said, you can get a cheaper one. They are not as good, but... they're cheaper. Lynxmotion's Biped, or the less fancy Parallax Todler.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
All 17 different joints are powered by a single motor
Really? I had no idea that 17 different servos could be powered by one motor. How interesting.
In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic.
Uh, yeah. And the $4,500 price tag for the Nipponese model is quite superior too.
I'll go for the affordable Korean model, thank you.
I grew up in St. Joseph, MI down the street from the Heath/Zenith plant. They released the heathkit HERO robot, the first (this is arguable, Im not really a robot historian) consumer grade robot.
We had one in school, our science teacher had buddies at Heathkit. You programmed it in assembly, via a keypad on the top of the robot. I don't even remember if there was a way to load an instruction set into it, until later models came along.
There is a website dedicated to the good ol Hero. Back then (late 1980s) we were sure that by 2004 we'd all be living with robots like the ones in the new I,Robot movie. I guess it didn't really happen.
It would be cool if the I,Robot bad guy (only seen the trailer, they got THAT GUY, who always plays villans, to play the villan) had a HERO on his desk or something. Esp. since the USR company in the movie is supposed to be in Chicago, right across the lake and home of several Zenith facilities.
The description on the page sucks, but go to your local Best Buy and check out the RoboSapien. Its joints have several degrees of freedom, and the remote looks like a TiVo remote on steroids.
If that's not screaming to be hacked, hooked to a linux box, and used to terrify the cat, I don't know what is. And at 1/14th the price of the Korean `bot. It's not a kit though, which I know is a negative on Slashdot...
How is this different to Robosapien?
Kopropo.com
These little guys were the star of the recent Robolympics in San Francisco (apart from my combat robot that it :) ) - absolutely amazing - some great pictures here.
In the robotics group at Stanford they're working on human motion. Dynamic balancing is one of the issues they seem to have solved, and really well at that. Well, OK, it's "only" in simulation, but imagine plugging those algorithms into a real robot...
Last year I attended a talk about this project at a conference, and the videos were really amazing. Unfortunatley, the 'view movies' link at the bottom does not work for me -- maybe limited to their intranet?
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There is nothing to stop someone from building a knock off of this kit. Except maybe your math (17 joints = 17 motors) =].
The only thing that appears to be special about the servos is the position sensing. Based on someones translation of the page, you can program the robot by positioning its limbs and clicking a mouse button.
Since the servos only have three leads coming out of them (white, black and red like a regular RC servo) I'm going to guess that the servos are gutted of their electronics and their functionality is integrated into the controller. This would benefit the robot by reducing unecessary weight at the limbs (those nifty kung f u moves) and allow you to sense the positions of the limbs.
In a homebrew project the internal electronics in the servo are what make RC servos so attractive. You can get a positionable, speed regulated geartrain in a very compact package for very little money compared to fabricating your own. So unless you modify each servo you would have to give up the position sensing programability (which I could live with).
That said, if my guess is correct, it may be easier to make one of these things self balancing than previously thought since half the needed functionality is there (positioning).
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing