Category: Robots

Karakuri the tea Robot

This Japanese tea serving robot showed up on a few places on the ‘net today. I have long wondered if anyone would ever offer one of these in kit form and now I have my answer.
You can get one from the Robotstore for $90US ($170US if your a wimp and can’t build it from the kit).

The driving force of the original tea-carrying doll came from a spring made of whale whiskers (actually whale teeth). All the other components, such as its gears, body and escapement for speed adjustments, were made of wood. How does it work? When a tea cup is placed on the tray, the stopper is released by the whale spring attached to the doll’s arms; the spring forces the stopper to engage again when the cup is lifted from the tray.

[via Engadget and MAKEzine]

Karakuri kit

High Soaring Linux!

With a conventional Nokia cell phone relaying GPS information to the tracking station, this home built high altitude balloon was successful in reaching over 66,000 feet and traveled over 60 miles! A tiny computer called a Gumstix that runs Linux was controlling two cameras that pointed down and at the horizon. The results were very impressive.

Pegasus 1 High Altitude Balloon Project

Vehicle piloted by a fish

Vehicle piloted by a fish

How cool is this? A camera detects the movement of the fish and steers the robot accordingly. This is right up there with the roach robot and the monkey controlled robot arm. This is not only a fish driven robot, but it is now the first time one of our finned friends can explore on its own the strange alien world of the ‘surface’. One small stroke for a fish, one giant leap for all fish-kind! (I smell a movie script in here somewhere…)

Vehicle piloted by a fish

NASA – How We’ll Get Back to the Moon

NASA Plans Moon Mission

NASA has unveiled a plan to return to the moon not too long ago. It’s going to look more like the old Apollo missions of the ’60s. Sounds like a good idea to me, the basic ideas have been tested already and are known to work. The advances in technology over the last 30 years will make for larger vehicles and better performance. Lets hope for solid funding and for politics to keep its nose out of the mix so we can look up at the moon and marvel at the bases there.

NASA – How We’ll Get Back to the Moon

DIY Sentry Gun

Kevin sent me this weapon of choice the other day:

The idea of this project was to create a fully-automated sentry gun, capable of picking out a human target and accurately tracking and shooting him or her in the heart. Really, the idea was to find a cool robotics project for the summer while I was working at an advertising agency, and I’d only ever seen sentry guns in movies (like Congo) and video games (Half-Life 1, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress Classic). I couldn’t find any record of anyone building one, even the military, although it seems likely I just didn’t look hard enough. It’s a pretty simple technology.

I think I can answer why there arn’t any of these systems in the real world. You just can’t trust a robot to not shoot you in the back. Thats a tough one to code around.

Sentry Gun