I can think of very few things that I enjoy as much as spending time with my 8 year-old daughter building robots. (Assembling Lego Star Wars kits admittedly finishes a close second.) We both like to build our botsĀ from scratch, but when we lack time, motivation, and/or my full attention, a kit is often more …
Category: Robots
Mar 29 2006
TomCat, a Robot Cat Sans Head
Still looking to fill the void left since Sony surreptitiously put down their robot dog Aibo, I am always excited to read about any new robotic animals under development. The Raw Feed is reporting today that Illinois-based robotic research group Iguana Robotics Inc. has created TomCat, a headless robot cat whose lack of visual aesthetics …
Mar 23 2006
CMU to Build Robot City
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is reporting today that Carnegie Mellon University is planning to build a hi-tech robot research and development facility called Robot City on the site of a former steelworks plant. With the stated mission of moving “robots from laboratory to life,” Robot City will be populated by robots built to handle relatively mundane …
Mar 22 2006
NXT Pre-Orders Start April 1st
Gizmodo.com is reporting that retailers will begin taking pre-orders for the forthcoming Lego Mindstorms NXT robot development kit starting April 1st. The system, priced at $249, will not ship until late summer and will be available at Amazon, Target, Fry’s and Wal-Mart. This follows the news from earlier this month that Lego had chosen 100 …
Mar 22 2006
Evolution Robotics Partners with WowWee
In a press release put out this morning, California-based Evolution Robotics announced that they will be licensing their ViPR (Visual Pattern Recognition) and Northstar position tracking technologies for use in WowWee’s next generation of hi-tech consumer robots and entertainment products. WowWee, who manufactures the immensely popular Robosapien and Roboraptor robots, has recently been making a …
Mar 21 2006
Pirkus-R Fails to Impress
As I predicted last Friday, the coverage by Robots-Dreams.com of the Robo-One competition that took place in Tokyo over the weekend has been nothing short of outstanding. Lem dropped us a comment this morning to let us know that he actually got some face time (pun intended) with the Pirkus-R Type-01 robot, the Bluetooth humanoid …
Mar 19 2006
The Mythbusters Build a Vex PackBot
For the premier issue of Robot magazine the guys from the popular Discovery Channel show Mythbusters documented their attempt to recreate an iRobot PackBot using stock components of the Vex Robotics Design System. Even though no one had any previous experience with the Radio Shack robotics kit, co-hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage together with …
Mar 18 2006
Pirkus-R Gets a Facial Recognition Upgrade
PinkTentacle.com reports today that the Pirkus-R Type-01 robot has recently had its facial recognition software updated. The upgrade addresses limitations that had often hindered recognition attempts by earlier models, including variations in lighting and positioning of the target subjects. Now Pirkus-R can track the location and orientation of its target and move itself into position …
Mar 15 2006
A Robot for Carrying Grandmas
OK, the truth is that right now the RI-MAN humanoid robot can only carry your grandma if she weighs less than 26 pounds, and if she does, she’s got bigger problems than not being able to walk. (That’s a doll in the pic.) But the goal of RI-MAN’s creators is for him to be able …
Mar 14 2006
Ryomei Engineering’s Robot Carp
Today is shaping up to be aquatic robot day, so it’s fitting that Pink Tentacle brings us an article about a robot built by Ryomei Engineering that is modeled after a koi carp. At 31 inches long and 26 pounds, the robotic koi can swim like the real thing plus do some things its inspiration …