I have been building little robot projects on and off for the last few years. Most of the projects I start reach the point where the feasability of what I had in mind is proven. Not long after that, the magic ends, and I lose interest. One project that I have managed to stick with for the last few months is the Belligerator. While there has been a lot of progress, one of the things that has haunted me is the lack of a decent drive motor for the wheels. Sure, I have been able to get fairly good speed control out of a Futaba standard servo, but fine positioning has been very difficult, and several of my quadrature encoders have proven to be insufficiently accurate. Finally I decided it was time for something drastic.

Enter the ultimate servo hack:

• 1 amp current handling
• Serial, PWM, or triggered canned cycle control
• Programmable, and serialized
• Daisy chainable
• < 1mm positioning accuracy at the wheel
• Absolute, relative, and velocity modes
• GPL licensed firmware, and Creative Commons hardware

Of course, to complete these design goals, and not break the bank, I had to get a little clever. What follows are the instructions on how to duplicate my effort...

To be continued...

this cool mecha project comes from Alaska, where the creator (Carlos Owens) is building a 18 foot tall prototype mecha! This first prototype is powered by hydraulic cylinders, and has yet to take it's first step, but Carlos hopes to test by summer 2005.

Reminds me of mechaps, but with less vapour.

Northrop Grumman have been selected by NASA to source several new technologies for space exploration. Among them is a cool (and mildly sinister looking) robot. This robot will be used for repair and maintenance of the outside of space vehicles in order to reduce crew risk on EVAs.

Other interesting projects include a stowable heat shield, and a "space ferry" for hauling materials and people between the moon and lunar orbit.

Driving these new technologies is NASA's new vision for space exploration (pdf).

This video shows that Asimo has a new running feature. Asimo can now run at up to 3km/h. This feature comes along with a new posture control system which gives a more fluid, and expanded range of motion to the prototype Honda robot. There have been significant upgrades to the rest of the robot too, with a higher mobility neck and hip, and more sensors. The robot is also now capable of gesture recognition as well.

These, and many more update videos are available here on Honda's HDTV site. All videos are macromedia flash format. I particularly like this video, which shows Asimo acting as perhaps the world's most expensive line following robot.

MIT, Brown University, and Providence VA medical center have teamed up to prototype some new prostheses which use magnetorheological fluid, and series elastic actuators to provide motion control. Taking signals from an injectible wireless muscle actuation sensor, the limbs can read the residual muscle for control information. This is a big improvement from previous implanted wire systems, which cause tissue damage.

The Ecobot II is a new robot built at the Intelligent Autonomous Systems lab at the University of West England. An extension of the proof of concept otherwise known as slugbot, the new Ecobot II is capable of powering itself off of a diet of dead flies (or other decomposable fuels), which are converted into a power generating sludge using a microbial fuel cell.

While the research is still immature, the scientistts are hoping to build flying robots which can feed themselves while they work.

Robotlab (courtesy of Robots.net) is a German group that took an industrial robot and turned it into a fascinating (and somewhat utterly terrifying) display. They remind me of a more sanitary version of SRL. Their robot (from the people that brought you the robocoaster) weighs in at 2.5 tonnes, and can move 250 pounds at 1m/s (6.6 fps) to 1/10th of a millimeter accuracy (that is 2.5 thou in imperial). Refer to the scary picture again...

A little late, I know, but Generation5 has released the most recent version of their AI JDK for all of you Java freaks out there. There are a large number of online demonstrations available (Conway's game of life has always been a favourite). There are some interesting machine vision and neural network libraries in there too. There is an amazing amount of stuff in there.

It might be a good time to go install eclipse (a java IDE).

Highly recommended.

While the other sites are all over this already, I thought I should weigh in on the new mine exploration bot (named Green Meanie), designed by Jessica Dooley and Keith Brock at the University of Arizona. The robot uses a 900mhz radio link back to the control computer outside the mine, and cost a mere $200USD to build (half of which went to the oversize RC truck wheels), not including the sponsor radios. The pair plan to explore a mine in the backyard of Dooley's grandmother.

While the 1960s flashback motif clearly indicates that somebody has slipped something "unusual" into the Toyota punchbowl, these new vehicles (or personal mobility devices, as Toyota is calling them), are undeniably cool. There are also some new robots to go with the walking and rolling vehicles. I find myself wondering if this is going to tie into Toyota's visual vehicle guidance research.

UPDATE: Girlontheleft notes that the rolling mobility device looks strangely like this device, an anime assistant chair for the elderly (which of course runs amok and destroys tokyo). Sci-fi always seems to precede invention.