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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.
"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.
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
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.
Mindstorms are pretty cool, but these are completely awesome. The only downside is they're a bit more expensive than Mindstorm.
Maybe not