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!
I’m digging this Israeli military robo-snake(!) of which each segment packs its own power supply, sensors, actuators, and microcontrollers. Looks like the business end has a camera ringed with IR LEDs. (See the snake in action in this video.) [Via Dvice] More: Modular snake robots Amphibious snake-like robot “ACM-R5” Swimming robot snake
While this news will not hit the radars of folks tuned to Groupon acquisitions and Facebook IPOs – I think this is a really good investment… NASA is providing up to $20 million over the next five years to support a national program to inspire student interest in science, technology and mathematics with a focus […]
Sebastian Neitsch, Jan Bernstein, and Woeishi Lean teamed up to make this Kunstrasen robot, which uses a miniature flame thrower to draw graphics on your (or someone else’s) lawn.
This video by YouTube user UncleJtotheS shows a “third year Mechatronics project at the University of Ottawa” that automatically pours a glass of beer — though not a pint, which is either 16 or 19.2 ounces depending on which side of the border you are. But I quibble, when it comes to automatically pouring beer […]
nelson8815 on Instructables made this hydraulic robot arm our of a pizza box and some tape. More: Holiday Gift Guide 2010: Robots @Makezine.com blog Homebrew SCARA robot arm Building a robot arm from foam Industrial robot arm catapults flaming bowling balls
The OpenKinect windfall keeps rolling in. The folks over at Willow Garage look like they’ve been having a blast developing an improvised teleoperation system and generally riffing on all the wonderful possibilities inspired by the Microsoft Kinect controller and OpenKinect driver.
The latest in robotic vacuum cleaning is the XV-11 from Neato Robotics – and it features a scanning LIDAR laser range-finding module that is ripe for repurposing in other robots. Chris over at Sparkfun lovingly tore in to one and wrote up the results so far – the module has a simple serial port interface […]
