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!
Scientists from the university of Reading have created a simple wheeled robot with distance sensors that is controlled wirelessly by a network of cells from a rat’s brain. The sensor data is fed to the neurons which reside in a nutrient/antibiotic solution – the cells output is then transmitted to the ‘body’ as control commands. […]
An Arduino, model bulldozer, servos, and sensors can be hacked together to make a sub-$100 robotics platform, appropriately named Ard-e. While certainly nowhere near as fancy as this Wall-E replica, the price is right and the Arduino’s got a huge body of pre-existing code for working with sensors that the aspiring roboticist can build upon. […]
The “CotsBots” are inexpensive, modular mobile robots created from off-the-shelf components. The bots are “meant as a platform to investigate algorithms, cooperation, and distributed sensing in large robot networks.” Each bot includes built in radio communication, and are written in TinyOS, an open source system for large-scale distributed sensor networks. Pretty cool idea that we […]
Double-Taker (Snout) by Golan Levin was created for the Robot 250 Festival in Pittsburgh. I really like how it is programmed to make “double takes” of the people passing by. I wonder if I can get a giant robotic Snout for the top of my house? “Double-Taker (Snout)” (interactive installation, 2008) deals in a whimsical […]
This is a cool little self-balancing robot that doesn’t use any fancy accelerometers or gyroscopes. You might even have all the parts needed to make one of these right now. This is a very simple robot that uses a simple switch as a sensor and stands on only two wheels with inverted pendulum mechanism. When […]
The “Heart Robot” was created by a team of Bristol UK researchers and artists in order to investigate the effects that a seemingly emotional machine can have on humans. The puppet responds to changes in sound, light and movement through automated control of eye movement, a virtual heartbeat and breath which inflates his belly and […]
Our pal I-Wei Huang, of Crabfu Steamworks, has issued a challenge on the Trossen Robotics Forums. It’s a contest, judged my I-Wei, to find the most “characterful” robot. He writes: To bring a bunch of hardware the illusion of life and character. This is NOT about AI or fancy software or hardware. It’s not to […]
