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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.
Ohhh Boy, embedded video on the web page. That site will be smoked QUICK!
Here is a link that shows what appears at a glance to be a superior robot model from Japan doing all kinds of neat tricks. It has 22 Degrees of Freedom rather than the 17 DOF in the robot from Wow Robot. This page also has video, but they are all links at the bottom of the page.
I agree that one of these would be great fun to play with!
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
...she's a replicant, isn't she?
That is an interesting approach. Basically it looks like their robot is a framework for servos. There's almost nothing to it but servo mounts that are connected to each other.
The video is impressive, but are we watching a simple playback of a preprogrammed sequence? In that case, no dynamic "balancing" is necessary.
A robot with true balance would have to be MUCH more sophisticated.
As of this writing US $1 = 1,149.25 South Korean Won. That makes the robot US $1261.69.
Here's anotherKorean bot kit. Fun stuff. I saw them demo the quad w/RF module. Takes some of the fun out of it, but then again you can concentrate on AI if that's your thing.
When you consider things like Segway costing thousands, and video cards costing $400-$500 and high-end MP3 players at $500+, $1400 is not all that much more. Think of it a different way...5 years ago, you'd pay $2500 for a PII...
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.