Making a robot can be an incredibly rewarding experience. It’s the perfect combination of creativity, engineering and problem solving. However, if you’re just getting started in robotics, it can also be overwhelming. To make things easier for those who are just starting out, we’ve put together some tips and tricks to help makers bring robots to life! From the basics of assembling your robot to software implementation, these pointers will give you everything you need to get started on your robotic adventure!
OMG, these four and six-legged robot races, line-following competitions, are amazing. And pretty hysterical. Like the Boston Dynamics bots, and some of the other robots we’ve covered here, these are sort of unsettling in how biological they’re movements and behaviors feel. Via Society of Robots More: Boston Dynamics Big Dog (new video) Insanely cool, creepy […]
Max Flebus, a MAKE subscriber from Milan, sent us a link to this wonderful video of musician Paolo Angeli (who’s worked with Fred Frith) playing a guitar that has motors inside the sound hole whacking away on the strings and robot-finger-like strikers, powered by foot pedals, that Paolo controls while playing the guitar with a […]
There’s a growing roster of found-object artists working in what I call mechanical animism, an aesthetic world where the margins between the born and the made have become leaky and distinctions between humans, animals, and machines are fluid and ambiguous. One of the true masters of this genre is Belgian artist Stéphane Halleux. We’ve fawned […]
For the next issue of MAKE, our second robot-themed issue, I’m doing a review of one of my favorite robot-related books, Valentino Braitenberg’s Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. It is a seminal work in robotics, especially with behavior-based robotics, BEAM, and other forms of simple, bottom-up robot architectures. Alex at Tinkerlog decided to build a […]
Here’s a piece on the WowWee RoboCommunity forums about adding LEDs lamps onto the head-stalk of your Rovio. One of the criticisms of the Rovio is the rather poor camera mounted in the head. The lack of lighting on the head-stalk doesn’t help. If you try and look up at something with your robo-head, and […]
Here’s a robo-blimp that some students at Colorado State University designed. They score points just for coming up with the name infraLED Zeppelin. The article includes PDF build instructions and a complete parts list. Gadget Freak Case 139: The Autonomous Blimp [Thanks, Phillip!]
Adafruit industries took a little field trip recently to W/—— project space in Chinatown, NYC to check out Peter Sand’s robot-tended garden. The giant robot creates a garden, plants seeds, waters them and lovingly tends to it – the operator can control the robotics with a game controller and for the Arduino fans, it has […]
