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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.""
The kit contains an assortment of pom poms, pipe cleaners, and other craft materials reminiscent of a summer camp art period.
This one time at summer camp, I built a cheerleader robot.
God spoke to me.
I wish I had this when I was a kid. Robotics is what got me interested in programming in the first place and I'm sure I'm not the only one. It's one thing to see "hello world" on a computer screen, but programming a "light seeking" or other simple robot can really get the imagination going.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
. . .raman-i-am.
I just call him "Noodle" for short.
KFG
If you really want to do some programming of a robot, then Mindstorms is a lot better than this dopey toy. Mindstorms is easy to get going with, yet has significant depth and you can keep learning..... Hit the wall of the Mindstorms UI and you can add Lejos or similar and go to a whole new level of complexity.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"The most fun was programming the robots. It felt like giving life to lifeless bodies.""
Maybe he could get that job with Stephen Hawking...
we'll be able to clean up the internet and its tubes !
Flash-heavy site though.
I just don't know... I still don't think these are the droids I'm looking for.
I've always been skeptical of kit robotics. I'm a robotics post-grad student so perhaps I'm spoiled by some of the gear I get to play with, but I've always found that robot kits seem kinda wimpy and limited. I'm so tired of seeing line followers and edge follower robots. Lego mindstorms was a step in the right direction - giving you a platform that can be used to make some truly interesting applications, but I still bemoan the underpowered motors they provide. One day I'd like to make and sell a robot kit with simple optical vision (say 32x32 pixels), some serious motors (50 W or so) and a linux based embedded system, with an RC radio jack and all of the interfacing worked out and a nice development environment. That would be a kit worth having and it would have rocked as a kid.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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So far, the Radio Shack/FIRST VEX robotics kits seem to be the most interesting pre-fab robotics kits next to the older Lego MindStorms kits. There are numerous sites that carry add-on parts (sensors, timing gears, etc...) for the VEX kits, as well as the long awaited programming module.
Of course, if you'd rather go the old-school route, you could go looking for Capsela sets and try hacking together a few custom bubble modules to give it some intelligence.
8==8 Bones 8==8
The best lego kit for the money is the XBC Robot Starter Kit. Its a little rough around the edges, and the documentation could be *way* better, but the XBC is wicked :-)
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.
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.
More than mere navel gazing.
I once worked for a company that was using the mindstorm software to run a real live production bot stamping sheetmetal parts for cars... It never worked right.. lol What do you expect for "toy" software and a windows machine that skips a clock cycle on sync motors... I quit that job... Jack-legg ppl....