Matt Denton of MicroMagic Systems has upgraded his Hexagon robot, which initially only did face recognition, to be able to draw with a pen. It literally walks up to the sheet of paper and begins drawing a…uh, well…I don’t know what it drew. But, it draws!
“Using B.F.Hexapod with an additional floating pen attachment, and a utility I wrote to convert DXF files into translation commands for my p.Brain controller, I have got the start of a walking CNC router! Why… I don’t know.. it just seemed like a good idea at the time!
I still have to add a small routing head and test the cutting capabilities, but you get the idea. Resolution of the work area is pretty low, somewhere between 7 & 8 bit, with about 0.5mm repeatability, so it’s never going to make precision parts! Also I have only implemented straight lines within the p.Brain, so the utility converts arcs and circles into segments.
One obvious improvement to resolution & repeatability is to have a work surface (in this case paper) that doesn’t move around, in this video the only thing holding the paper in place.. is the hexapod’s feet. In order to keep the router out of the way while walking, I plan on attaching a servo to the router head to swing the head from a horizontal to vertical position. Or maybe I will have come to my senses by then!! If I’m really mad I could try some 3D milling.. as technically the hexapod Is a 6 axis CNC machine.”
Simroid, dubbed “Pain Girl”, is a 5 foot 3 inch robot designed by Dr. Naotake of Shibui of the Nippon Dental University in Tokyo to help new dental trainees to be more ‘gentle’ with their patients. The robot is able to express pain through the sensors in her mouth, capable of communicating with her dentist through speech, facial expressions, and body movements. Simroid even has sensors embedded in her chest which informs the teachers in the event a student molests her. Simroid, based off of a 28-year old model, was invented as a training tool to train new recruits on how to be more sensitive to their patients. It turns out, dentists are more rough on men than on women patients.
Unfortunately, I don’t understand Japanese, but it looks like “Pain Girl” can also be manually controlled by computer, by using a special software and a click of the mouse.
The Yellow Drum Machine is a robot with one sole purpose: to find things to drum on. The cute little robot has tracked “wheels” so it can roam around finding objects to lay beats on. The Yellow Drum machine can avoid obstacles, but when it finds an object worth playing on (it actually takes sound samples), it goes ahead and drums a little beat. It also records every beat it has played in the area, so it can playback the “recorded beat” while it plays a new beat. The Yellow Drum Machine is fully autonomous, there is no remote control.
It’s pretty f’ing cool. It cost $120 and 20 hours to build. Watch the video!!!
Update (3/23/08): Updated the vid. Looks like the old one died. Still, more vids at Let’s Make Robots.
This is one of the coolest things I have ever seen. Using a retail version of the Lego Mindstorms NXT kit, Hans Andersson, was able to design and construct a robot that could solve a Rubik’s cube. He called it Tilted Twister, because of the robot’s tilted stance. Using four included sensors — light, touch, ultrasonic, and sound — and three servo motors, Andersson was able to program the Tilted Twister to solve a scrambled Rubik’s cube in about 6 minutes average.
Tilted Twister first scans the cube using its color sensor to understand the cube’s arrangement. Its robotic arm is able to flip the Rubik’s cube over, allowing the sensor to scan each side. After it has completed the scan, its algorithm takes over and it begins to solve the cube using its flipping and twisting arms.
The uber geeks at MIT, have developed a fully autonomous UAV that can take off from the ground and hover, much like a helicopter. It can also take off from a vertical perch (vertical take off) and hover. It can even return (land) back at the perch, which is an amazing sight in itself. But that’s not all. The Autonomous UAV can also transition from a hovering state to horizontal level flight, allowing to to zip around the room. It actually looks weird when it hovers, it almost looks like some sort of special effect. Watching the airplane transition from hover to level flight mode is insane.
Wow. Watch the speed on the ABB IRB 340 FlexPicker. It is essentially a robotic food assembly line worker, the IRB 340 FlexPicker can sort the “good from bad” ridiculously fast. It can do 150 picks per minute, corresponding to a cycle time of 0.4 seconds. The accuracy of the IRB 340 is freakishly impressive. It has a maximum carrying weight capacity of 2 kg (just under 4.5 pounds). Watch the videos below to see it sort croissants and hot dogs.
Capuchin, built by the geeks at Stanford University, is a four limbed robot that can carefully shift its weight as it climbs a rock wall. Its ability to equally distribute its weight as it climbs makes it extremely stable. Unlike the previous version, Lemur (built in collaboration with NASA JPL), Capuchin is 40 times faster thanks to better and clever programming. But if you watch the video below, it’s still pretty damn slow. Unfortunately, Capuchin relies on a detailed maps of the climbing surface prior to being able to climb. Researchers plan to attach cameras to each individual limb, in hopes that the robot will be able to climb without the need for maps.
