how-to: bristle-bot

A fun variation on the pager-motor vibrobot design using a toothbrush with directional bristles, a pager motor, and a watch battery. Looks like a lot of fun in a short amount of time, and with no soldering either!

Brought to you by the folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

robonova simulator

RZ1Action is a program for Mac OS X or Windows (2000,ME,XP,Vista) that lets you preview your movements on a 3D Robonova model rendered and played back in real time. Bravo to Micono for writing this great simulator. Here's a link to his page.

solenoid symphony

This is an amazing little video that shows the kind of cool stuff you can do with an Arduino board, a bunch of two-dollar solenoids, duct tape, and a sense of rhythm. It starts off slow but really picks up after a couple seconds. Turn up the volume on this one!

The Make: post is here http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/01/solenoid_concert.html

monkey’s thoughts propel robot

In 2003, Dr. Nicolelis’s team at Duke university proved that monkeys could use their thoughts alone to control a robotic arm for reaching and grasping. Now he's gone and made it control a whole bipedal robot.












Here's a snippet:

"These experiments, Dr. Nicolelis said, are the first steps toward a brain machine interface that might permit paralyzed people to walk by directing devices with their thoughts. Electrodes in the person’s brain would send signals to a device worn on the hip, like a cell phone or pager, that would relay those signals to a pair of braces, a kind of external skeleton, worn on the legs. "

Read the whole thing here http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15robo.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

microrobotic fly from harvard

Wow! This is going to be a good year for robotics. Robert Wood, assistant professor of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard University has done some amazing work with a minimal amount of parts. Check out the whole story plus a longer video at the Harvard Magazine website.

From the article:

Wood figures he is still only one-third of the way toward his goal of creating an autonomous flying robot. But the next step should be at least as rewarding, considering that it will include a focus on control of the insect—the reason he first got involved in the project years ago. His fly now runs on electricity transmitted via thin wiring from high-voltage amplifiers, but he aims to add an on-board power source. Initially, he hopes for five minutes of flying time, which will be extended as the battery options improve.

Eventually, he hopes to program insect robots to work in a group. “We want a human operator to be able to take out his batch of flies and say, ‘I want you guys to search for carbon dioxide’—a survivor breathing in a collapsed building,” he explains. From there, Wood sees the possibility of building group behaviors into a swarm: a means of pursuing his interest in the study of emergence, which examines how simple organisms such as ants can produce complex group structures.