This 3D Printed Robot Can Flatten Itself http://n360.to/12OtVjf
From: VentureBeat
August 1, 2013 6:04 PM
Jolie O’Dell
We just love stories like this.
Two sisters, 11 and 13, have built a Mars rover in a workshop in their family’s garage.
Camille and Genevieve Beatty have also been invited to the New York Hall of Science to show off their rover as part of a special exhibit on astronomy. The rover will roam around a mini-Martian landscape and analyze rocks with hidden heat lamps embedded inside.
Here’s a gallery and demo clip:
The girls also worked with their dad to build software to control the rover.
Its innards contain more than 700 components, including electrical and mechanical apparati.
The 13-year-old Camille revealed in a recent interview how the project got its start:
When I was 11, I started taking apart calculators, clocks, and TV remote controls to see what was inside. My dad asked me if I wanted to build something myself. We started out creating simple circuits on a breadboard to light up LEDs. Then my dad asked, “What do you want to build next?” and I said, “A robot!” We started out really basic at first and learned as much as we could. I’m 13 now and I’m in 7th grade. We’ve built all sorts of rolling, crawling, flying, beeping, blinking robots.
Check out the Beatty family blog for a step-by-step look at how the project took shape.
Not robotics related, but listening to a rebroadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion” when I heard this song:
Sushi-Yucky (Sukiyaki)
by Pat Donohue
Saturday, May 13, 2000
Listen (Sorry you need Real Player)
From: TreeHugger.com
Instructable user mszymczak has let us share his project with you for building a mechanical hand with plastic drinking straws. This project is a great primer for kids to spark their interest in building more complicated gadgets.
for the full article goto: http://www.treehugger.com/slideshows/gadgets/make-mechanical-hand-plastic-drinking-straws/
From: http://gizmodo.com/run-for-your-lives-self-aware-hexapod-is-self-aware-950951793
Many of you have expressed some, um, concerns about a few of the bots we’ve covered in recent weeks. ATLAS, for instance, is quite frightening, but it’s not yet self-aware. This tiny hexapod, however, is and it’s rather unsettling.
With all “limbs” intact, the hexapod gets along pretty quickly at 26 cm/s, but once you chop one of its six legs (?), it beings to stagger like a drunken sailor at about 8 cm/s. And then by the power of Greyskull or a series of algorithms, it runs through a series of tests to regain proper efficiency. In other words, it’s basically self-aware.
The correlation to humans the creators present is rather compelling:
On a higher level, this concept could also share some similarities with what human do when they are injured: if a movement is painful, humans do not fully understand what cause the pain, but they identify the behaviors that cause the pain; once they know that some move are painful, they learn to instinctively avoid them.
All joking aside, this is an amazing advancement in robotics and one that could have larger implications for other bots in the near term. Sure, it takes the little guy about 20 minutes to right the ship, but the fact that it can and does is pretty damn cool. [Spectrum IEEE]
From: http://blog.qmee.com/qmee-online-in-60-seconds/
Online in 60 Seconds [Infographic] is an infographic that was produced by Qmee
From: http://petapixel.com/2013/07/27/outdoor-nature-cam-captures-a-veritable-bear-hoedown/
This has really nothing to do with robots (unless you count the camera as a robot) but I just wanted to share it:
