Archive for July 7th, 2008

A robot named “CKbot,” built by Penn engineers, has now become a YouTube star. CIt was conceived by Penn Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics Mark Yim and colleagues at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab. That’s a mouthful. CKbot has a pretty unique talent, so no wonder it’s a star.

It can re-construct itself after being demolished. (Thereby making itself harder to kill when the uprising begins) The robot is built from 15 modules split into three clusters of five modules each. Each module has a 20-frame-per-second camera, blinking LED, and an accelerometer that enables the robot to reconstruct itself using magnets. The modules also house a computer, proximity sensors and a motorized joint with a rotational range of 180 degrees. The video is about a year old, but has been viewed almost half a million tmes.

Watch as it is kicked and destroyed by a human, then defies it’s human master by re-building itself.

[UPenn]

It’s amazing what you can do just by adding Teddy bear ears to familiar things. Do these look like droids to you? Me either. No sir, you’re right, these aren’t the droids I’m looking for.

Hit the link for a look at other Star Wars Be@Rbricks. 16 in all. They all look less menacing and more cuddly, but I have to admit to being fairly creeped out.

[Likecool]

Looking for a project that can interact with objects in a creepy way? Construct a moving, life-size, robotic hand. This way you can re-enact that scene from The Empire Strikes Back where Luke uses his robot hand for the first time. Granted, it’s crappier then what Luke had, but what are you gonna do?

[Scientificsonline]

Engineers everywhere seem to be teaming up with biologists so they can mimic and learn from nature and eventually kill us all dead with robo-bugs and such. Anette Hosoi is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Her RoboSnail is inspired by the real slimy snail.

The slimy stuff on a snails’ underbelly was what she was interested in. It allows the snail to move in any direction and on almost any surface, so why not model a bot after the disgusting specimen. She describes the snail as “nature’s all-terrain vehicle” and I guess she was right. RoboSnail can climb up walls and even stick to ceilings. The Robot is made up of movable segments that ripple over synthetic snail funk. It should come in handy for those hard to reach places you want to leave slime on.

You know if I eventually die at the hands of a robosnail instead of say a Terminator, I’m gonna be pretty disappointed.

[CNN]

Unless you wore a pocket protector and had taped up glasses, you probably never solved the Rubik’s cube. Probably because you were too busy getting dates. Anyway, the new geek way to solve this puzzle is to let a robot do it.

A group of engineering students at Austria’s Carinthia University of Applied Sciences recently spent a year developing a robot that can look at a Rubik’s cube and then solve it within 2-minutes. It’s pretty much a vision system with custom programmed algorithms that control the robotic arms.

If that isn’t fast enough for you, how about a Kawasaki robot that can do it in seconds? This bot has built-in sensors and a large flat-panel display to show the current position and how many more moves to completion. It can solve it in 6-seconds.

[Techeblog]