Three Laws Safe

[phibermon]

I often browse sites containing awesome things of little to no practical use.

My latest discovery is robotic in nature, Lynxmotion create self assembly robot kits for the more serious enthusiast :

(EDIT : I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I just can't find any ready to build alternatives)

http://www.lynxmotion.com/

I don't know why I want a robot but some voice inside me tells me that I need one in order to be complete :)

Check out these videos demonstrating some capabilities :


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_NoxhOf4ko


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQG2cRtBCAg


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXnYx4zsywg

Unfortuantly, they're not exactly cheap! But beat a robosapien hands down, albiet robotic hands down.

[WILL]

Sweet! I want them! :D

I like this one too!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koc6xhPM420&feature=player_embedded

I was very serious about getting one of these before the price went WAY up to 8 grand. :( That kind of crushed my dreams of owning a read droid/robot like in all those sci-fi movies. At least my dream of owning those cool Star-Trek pads came true though! :D


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA6ndYRT8RE

[phibermon]

It's exciting to think that we may very well see an Artificial Intelligence system consistantly pass the Turing test within the next 20 years.

If quantum computing ever becomes a practical reality it will allow for the construction of Neural Networks of phenomonal size and complexity.

Hopefully not resulting in the destruction of humanity at the virtual hands of our artificial overlords

[chronozphere]

Yes, robotics is a really interesting subject. I'd love to have a whole bunch of those parts and create loads of different robots with them. The website seems to sell either complete arms or catapiller-tracks or small parts and electronics. I don't think it's possible to make a whole range of different robots with a small set of reusable parts, which is what I would love to do. :(

Maybe lego mindstorms is better for this? It seems a bit too toy-ish for me. Not sure whether mindstorms parts are sophisticated enough to allow you to build e.g an arm with many degrees of freedom (on a small scale) or make a bot that can lift something heavy.

[phibermon]

From things I read in the past, mindstorms has a very large modding community, hacks etc and while strength can be an issue I've seen some mindstorms stuff with very good articulation.

Lynx do sell lots of plastic body parts or all kinds of shapes and sizes, everything you need to build a robot of any design you can think of (check the servo errector sets) you want to minimize the weight on any load bearing servos as much as possible and their parts are light and strong to minimize twisting etc

But I think a lot of robotics has always been about fabricating your own peices which is perfectly reasonable given a few decent tools and sheets of suitable material.

I bet programming embedded devices to control servos is a lot of fun :D

[WILL]

My new obsession of late... saving up for it. :)


541


There is the Traxster (http://www.roboticsconnection.com/p-15-traxster-robot-kit.aspx) and the Stinger (http://www.roboticsconnection.com/p-73-stinger-robot-kit.aspx) Robot Kits....

I'm planning on making one of these completely autonomous. It'll take some work.

So anyone know much about the main difference between Li-Ion and Li-Po power supplies? I'm concerned about length/amount of charge and recharging time/life-span.

[phibermon]

lithium-ion polymer all the way, they're lighter and can be re-charged more times before they start to degrade, I'm not sure on exact figures but I believe it's somthing like an order of magnitude more than standard lithium-ion on average. If you want to expell a lot of energy over a short period of time then you can't beat the weight to power efficency of spinning up a flywheel or alternativley using pressurized gas and pneumatics.

Although I've no experience with robotics personally, I've seen plenty of robot wars hehe ;)