Do-It-Yourself Robotics

PreacherTom writes "Imagine Legos and Erector Sets on crack. The fruit of a collaboration between Lego and the MIT Media Lab, the Toronto-based startup Playful Invention Company is offering the PicoCricket, "a kit of parts that can be used to build an infinite variety of robotic inventions. The kit contains an assortment of pom poms, pipe cleaners, and other craft materials reminiscent of a summer camp art period. It also includes a collection of Lego bricks and electronics: the Cricket "brain" and a motor, colored lights and a soundbox, a digital display, and an infrared beamer that allows the Cricket to communicate with a PC on which kids write the programs that control their invention's behavior. Perhaps the most important parts in the Cricket kit are the four sensors, which detect light, sound, touch, and electrical resistance. "It was lots of fun making things and controlling their action," says Grover Venkatasubramaniam (age 10). "The most fun was programming the robots. It felt like giving life to lifeless bodies.""

Comments

This has been around for a while

[The Bungi]

And it's really cool. Here's the description from the official website: http://www.picocricket.com/whatisit.html

Flash-heavy site though.

Re:Mindstorms would be better

[timeOday]

Mindstorms are cool, but I was disappointed by the new version because it's still limited to a fixed, relatively small number of sensors and actuators per control module. I was really hoping for a bus-based architecture, where you could daisychain almost an arbitrary number of sensors and actuators, and address them individually in the code.

Kit robotics is getting better

[Animats]

There's real progress in kit robotics, but you have to be willing to pay roughly the price of a PS3 for it. See Lynxmotion and Hitec Robotics.

Among other things, you can finally get stock R/C type servos with a digital interface providing position and torque feedback. That's a huge step up - you're no longer stuck with blind position control; you can do force control and software-implemented compliance, like Brooks' insects from a decade ago. The actuator hardware is now available.

Sensing is improving, but a 6DOF INS is still rare on kit robots. That's purely a volume problem; accelerometer and gyro chips are cheap, but the systems haven't come down enough yet. We're starting to see rate gyros in kit robots; adding a rate gyro to an R/C biped makes the thing much more stable.

The software used to drive hobbyist robots tends to be way behind the state of the art, but that will get fixed as more people read the papers and write code. The next few years are going to be interesting.

Re:Mindstorms would be better

[jlarocco]

Mindstorms are pretty cool, but these are completely awesome. The only downside is they're a bit more expensive than Mindstorm.

Re:Hi Mister Teacher, my name is...

[The Cydonian]

Actually, it isn't. Indic words can be broken down into conjunct-consonant groups that roughly correspond to a single syllable. The kid's name, therefore, is more correctly broken down as veM-ka-t'a-s'u-bra-ma-nyam; I really haven't anyone break such a name down to 'asub', which, if you know Sanskrit, would mean 'inauspicious' (and thus defeat the purpose of having two Gods names in yours)

Might add here that the kid's real name is probably Siddharth (and not whatever they typed in the article)and that, quite possibly, he's carrying the surnames of both his parents; 'Grover' is probably his mom's surname, while Venkatasubramaniam is probably his Dad's name (and hence, he's bound to carry it as his surname according to Tamilian tradition). 'Venkatasubramaniam', as I was hinting earlier, is a conjunct word mixing the names 'Venkata' and 'Subramanyam', thus denoting a certain acceptance, and fusion, of the once competing twin traditions in Hindu theology, Shaivism and Vaishnavism. If the kid's dad was Irish, it's almost as if he was born into both Protestant and Catholic families and was named to reflect that.

In short, the kid's name carries a lot more cultural meaning than you guys can ever imagine'; he apparently bridges not only quasi-religious divisions in south India, but also the ethnic divisions between India's North and its South.

Don't let any of this stop you folks from cracking tasteless jokes on words you hardly understand though; not once is it irritating, exasperating, and plainly unfunny.