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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.
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.
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...
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.