Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Two feet tall, responds to voice commands, built in camera, user programmable, reverse chicken legs… Wow, I’ll take one of these over a RoboSapien any day. It does need some end effectors so it can grip things but other than that its darn cool. Look for this in stores soon for around $300US. Not a steal but far less costly than the KHR-1 type robots out there, those still cost over a thousand bucks.
[via Robot Gossip]
This reminds me of the robot fire fighters from the anime movie Metropolis. This machine will move into a fire and spray water on it for up to three hours (battery runs flat). If water isn’t doing the trick, it can also use foam. I can see this as being very handy for oil well fires and metal fires. Or just about any fire where the heat or danger of explosion is too great to risk humans.
[via Robot Gossip]
The blurb on the Arduno web page sums it up pretty well:
Arduino is an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple i/o board and a development environment that implements the Processing/Wiring language. Arduino can be used to develop stand-alone interactive objects or can be connected to software on your computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP). The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free.
So, has anyone used one of these? Please tell me how you like it, if it worked and all that.
Oh yeah, I’d want one of these. The heck with Segway polo, I want to see R7 polo. Heck, jousing would be cool too.
[via neaorama]
The use of robotic legged hauling devices might make the life of the average member of the US military a little easier.
The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth BigDog robots trot around in the shadow of an MV-22 Osprey while given commands via remote control at Marine Corps Air Station New River, N.C., June 26, 2006. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is considering plans such as weaponizing the BigDog robots and using them to carry extra gear to free Marines of the burden of extra weight.
‘BigDog’ gets it’s power from a hydraulic system powered by a gasoline engine. It weighs in at 75Kg and is about the size of a small mule (1m x .7m) and can carry a 54 Kg. load.
Just when I read about the Los Angles police department getting all reved up to deploy it’s latest new toy, the ‘SkySeer‘, they get shut down by the Federal Aviation Administration. What’s all the rhubarb about you ask? Well its over a 2.3 Kg bundle of high tech joy. The SkySeer is a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can loiter for over an hour and send back live video feeds to a laptop. It can also be programmed to fly a set course, navigating on an internal GPS. The ‘eye in the sky’ is being tested to see if it can be used in every day policing of the streets.
You know, to test an airplane you have to fly it. And when you fly an aircraft you have to obey the rules set forth by the FAA so you play nice with the other kids and don’t end up getting ingested by a commercial jet liner or smack into a traffic plane. Especially if on your big demo for the press your UAV crashes into the ground a few hundred yards from a group of reporters. I guess that didn’t impress the feds as they grounded the program citing air safety concerns and lack of authorization. Oops! Bad cops, no donuts!