As announced in the recent RobotShop Press Release, the Mint, a floor wiping robot  by Evolution Robotics, is finally out in the wild and available at RobotShop along with all of its robotic floor cleaning friends.

After vacuum robots, now it is the turn for floor wiping (or Swiffer) robots to clean our houses. This smart rather diminutive robot silently and systematically wipes the entirety of the floors of the unsuspecting owner. It can even mop the floor if need be . It uses a navigation technology called NorthStar that allows it to track its position anywhere in a room with the help of a stationary beacon. See the video below for further details.

Via RobotShop Blog.

Here is a nice little video about the  Neato XV-11 engineering samples getting unboxed. The video goes trough the various features and accessories for the new and exciting XV-11. As shown at the end of the video, the robot is quite smart and can clean surfaces very efficiently. We cannot wait to see an XV-11 autopsy in order to have a better look at the SLAM system.

Via RobotShop Blog.

Lessons Menu:

• Lesson 1 – Getting Started
• Lesson 2 - Choosing a Robotic Platform
• Lesson 3 - Making Sense of Actuators
• Lesson 4 - Understanding Microcontrollers
• Lesson 5 - Choosing a Motor Controller
• Lesson 6 - Understanding Communication Methods
• Lesson 7 - Using Sensors
• Lesson 8 - Getting the Right Tools
• Lesson 9 - Assembling a Robot
• Lesson 10 - Programming a Robot

Getting Started

Welcome to the first installment of the Grand RobotShop Tutorial, a series of 10 lessons that will teach you how to make your own robot. This tutorial is aimed at anybody willing to get started in robotics and have a basic understanding of terms such as “voltage”, “current”, “motor”, and “sensors”. Although this might seem pretty basic, even people with previous robot building experience might find useful information regarding the general method of building a robot.

What is a robot?

There are many definitions of robot and no real consensus has been attained so far. We loosely define a robot as follows:

Robot: An electromechanical device which is capable of reacting in some way to its environment, and take autonomous decisions or actions in order to achieve a specific task.

This means that a toaster, a lamp, or a car  would not be considered as robots since they have no way of perceiving their environment. On the other hand, a vacuum cleaner that can navigate around a room, or a solar panel that seeks the sun, can be considered as a robotic system.

It is also important to note that the  “robots” featured in Robot Wars for instance or any solely remote controlled device would not fall under this definition and would be closer to a more complex remote controlled car.

Although this definition is quite general, it might need to evolve in the future in order to keep up with the latest advancement in the field. In order to get a sens of how robotics is rapidly growing, we suggest you take a look at the RobotShop History of Robotics.

Let’s get started

This series of tutorials is intended to guide you through the steps of building a complete mobile robot.

There are 10 lessons that will be released in the following 10 weeks.  Each lesson guides you through one step of making a general-purpose mobile robot.  This will enable you to build your very own mobile robot in order to perform a task of your choice. Each lesson will be illustrated with an example from RobotShop experience in producing the RobotShop Rover. The lessons are intended to be read one after the other and build upon the information gained.

STEP 1

The first step is to determine what your robot should do (i.e. what is its purpose in life). Robots can be used in almost any situation and are primarily intended to help humans in some way. If you are unsure of what you want your robot to do or simply want to concentrate your efforts on specific tasks, here are some ideas:

Knowledge & Learning

In order to build increasingly complex robots, most professionals and hobbyists use knowledge they have acquired when building previous robots. Instead of building one robot, you can learn how to use individual components with the objective of building your own “knowledge library” to use to undertake a larger, more complex design in the future.

Amusement & Companionship

Building a robot is in and of itself is fun and exciting. Robotics incorporates aspects of many disciplines including engineering (mechanical, electrical, computer), sciences (mathematics and physics) and arts (aesthetics) and users are free to use their imagination. Amusing others with your creations (especially if they are user-friendly and interactive) helps others to become interested in the field.

Competitions & Contests

Competitions give the project design guidelines and a due date. They also put your robot against others in the same class and test your design and construction skills. Although many competitions are specifically for students (elementary to university), there also exist open competitions where adults and professionals alike can compete.

Autonomous life form

Humans are natural creators and innovators. The next great innovation will be to develop a fully autonomous life form that rivals or surpasses ourselves in ability and perhaps creativity. This goal is still being accomplished in small steps by individuals, research organizations and professionals.

Domestic or Professional tasks

Domestic robots help liberate people from unpleasant or dangerous tasks and give them more liberty and security. Professional and Service Robots are used in a variety of applications at work, in public, in hazardous environments, in locations such as deep-sea, battlefields and space, just to name a few. In addition to the service areas such as cleaning, surveillance, inspection and maintenance, we utilize these robots where manual task execution is dangerous, impossible or unacceptable.  Professional and Service Robots are more capable, rugged and often more expensive than domestic robots and are ideally suited for professional and/or commercial use.

Security and Surveillance

Most mobile robots are used to venture into areas where humans either should not or cannot go. Robots of various sizes (either remote controlled, semi-autonomous or fully autonomous) are an ideal choice for these tasks.

Practical Example

We anticipate that most of you following this guide have the objective of building a robot for learning and knowledge, but also for sheer fun; though many will have a specific idea or project they want to materialize.

The last major consideration is budget. It is difficult to know exactly what people have in mind when they build their first robot; one might already want to build an autonomous snow removal robot, while another simply wants to make an intelligent clock. A simple programmable mobile robot might cost about $100 while a more complex can be several thousands of dollars.

In this exercise, we have chosen to make a mobile platform in order to get an understanding of motors, sensors, microcontrollers and programming, and to include a variety of sensors. We’ll keep the budget to about $200 to $300 since we want it to be fairly complete.

See you next week when we discuss how to chose the best type of robotic platform for your needs.

RobotShop is proud to announce the immediate availability of the DFRobotShop Rover, an Arduino-compatible robotic tracked platform. At an 89.99 USD price-tag, this is by far the most affordable, programmable mobile robot in the market.

The DFRobotShop Rover is a versatile mobile robot tank based on the popular Arduino Duemilanove.  It incorporates all the Duemilanove features (since it uses a surface mount ATMega328),  including shield compatibility, and is supplemented with (1) an on-board DC step-up that allows it to be easily powered from small power sources such as AA batteries,  (2) a dual H-bridge DC-motor controller (L293B), and (3) an APC220 and Bluetooth serial interface connector for telemetry and radio control. As an addition it also features a temperature and light sensors that can be readily connected to analog inputs on the ATMega328 for immediate use. This Arduino-compatible platform rides on the popular Tamiya twin motor gearbox and the Tamiya track and wheel set.  This created a low-cost traction system that has been tested to carry over 2 kg without issues.

- Robotshop Blog

Let us know what would you like to do with this very cool Arduino tank.

Via RobotShop Blog.

Clinton Blackmore form the Southern Alberta Robotics Enthusiasts club put together some pretty neat software to control Lego NXT motors and sensors by using the Arduino microcontroller.

He is using the Mindsesors Multiplexer for NXT Motors coupled with an Arduino Compatible Seeeduino in order to control a small robot made from Lego NXT parts, read NXT encoders, and more.  The code for the Arduino can be found in the NXT I2C Devices For Arduino Project Page.

The possibilities that this enables are almost endless.  Especially when considering that now Arduino Shields can be used in order to extend the capabilities of the Lego NXT parts.

Via RobotShop Blog.

Today is a great day in the history of GoRobotics.net. On this 10 year anniversary,  RobotShop has taken on the mission of continuing the legacy or Mr.  William Cox, the founding father of GoRobotics.net, by maintaining and further expanding this community by continuing to post interesting robotics projects, news and by sharing our experience for everyone to enjoy.

Just like William, we at RobotShop are truly passionate about robots and happy to be part of a community that is equally enthusiastic and interested in everything robotic. We are happy to join GoRobotics.net, and to tackle the challenge of bringing you (yes, you) the latest and greatest developments in this rapidly expanding field.

Besides reporting on cool robotic projects selectively chosen from around the internet, we will initially publish the How to Make a Robot, Grand Tutorial Series. These are going to be a series of detailed tutorials on how to get started with robotics by guiding you through the process of making a simple, general purpose mobile robot. It’s our way of thanking you for your sustained interest and enthusiasm.

We are thrilled about this new opportunity to reach out to the GoRobotics community. As always, please leave a message with your thoughts/concerns/questions as we are eager to hear back from you.

Long live GoRobotics.net!

The iPhone controlled flying robot, AR-Drone, which was debuted at CES this year, now has a price tag. Parrot has announced that the autonomous quadracopter will retail for $300 USD and be available in September. While Gizmodo says, “ouch!”, we say “wow!” because I was fully expecting a >$500 price tag, considering that the vehicle has 2 cameras and Wifi connectivity, along with an ultrasonic altimeter and gyro-stabilization. You can read the details on Parrot’s page.

The AR-Drone appears to be a great platform for hacking, since Parrot has already said they will be releasing an API for interfacing to the vehicle, and the on-board processor is a 500 MHz ARM9 running Linux with 128 Mb of RAM. I can’t wait till September!

[Via RobotBox, via Gizmodo]

Dan Kara, president of Robotics Trends, just emailed me to let me and you readers know that there’s a free Robotics Virtual Summit going on tomorrow, June 16th, 2010 from 9AM – 6PM EST. It will feature presentations from MobileRobots, Inc.,  NASA Ames Research Center, 5D Robotics, Inc., National Instruments and others. Here’s a list of the conference sessions.

The idea of a “virtual” conference is a little goofy, but maybe it’ll be useful. Either way, it’s free to attend. So, kick back with a brew tomorrow and have some virtual conference fun.

Ok folks, I know it’s taken a while, but the results are finally in and we now have winners for the GoRobotics 10th anniversary giveaway! I’m super excited about this and very grateful to our prizes sponsors:
Pololu
Solarbotics ,
Vex Robotics,
Apress, and No Starch Press.

Before listing the winners let me say a few words on the judging. Each project had at least two judges (and some had three) who evaluated the robots based on three criteria: Originality/Creativity (25%), Workmanship (25%), and Builder Experience (50%). Finally, each robot got up to a +/- 50% adjustment based on the judges discretion. Basically we tried to judge based on cool robots and account for how much experience the builder had. In the end, I think it worked out pretty well. I’d also like to give a big thanks to all the entrants! It was a lot of fun judging all the neat creations. You folks do some nice work!

To accommodate some winners I changed around the prizes a bit from the original post. So, without more delay, the winners:

3rd Place - HaloBOT by mcb1 – chosen at random

Mark says, “I built HaloBOT for my daughter. It was her design, which was based on an earlier version that used overseas sourced parts. It is based on Picaxe18 and can be programmed in either basic or flowchart, which suits her programming level.”

HaloBOT wins:

Pololu Jrk 21v3 USB Motor Controller (donated by Pololu), Build Your Own CNC Machine (donated by Apress), LEGO Mindstorms NXT One-Kit Wonders (donatedby No Starch Press). ($105 total!)

2nd Place – Mosquito Rover by MarkusB

Markus says, “[The Mosquito Rover] Navigates around via IR, produces oxyhydrogen, shoots off rubber plugs. The idea behind the mosqito rover was to combine robotics and chemistry — in this case electrochemistry — and that the robot makes it’s own explosives by solar power and propels a second small flying object with it.”

He also says, “I will donate the Arduino Kit to a Chinese student who can not afford to buy it under the condition to build a robot and post this robot on LMR.” Awesome!

The Mosquito Rover wins:

Oomlout Arduino Experimenters Kit (donated by Solarbotics), Practical Arduino and LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0: The Kings Treasure (donated byApress), and The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor’s Guide (donated by No Starch Press) ($165 total!)

1 st Place Prize – LadyBugBot by isotope

Vadim ‘isotope’ says, “Regarding how the idea of building LadyBugBot came to me… It did as all brilliant ideas come, when I was opening my fridge to get another beer, I saw a tiny ladybug magnet… At that very moment, my Muse dropped a construction brick on my head, and I told myself I’m going to build a robotic fridge magnet! And I did it! )))”

Vadim has been interested in electronics since an early age, but didn’t start building robots till well after college when he stumbled across the website letsmakerobots.com. Now it’s his hobby of choice.

LadyBugBog wins:

Penguin Robot Extreme NXT(donated by Apress), Wall Hugging Mouse Kit (donated by Zagros Robotics), LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Thinking Robots (donated by No Starch Press) ($268 total!)

Grand Prize Winner – Walkin’ Sticks by ButchAlline

ButchAlline says, “This is a very simple crawler robot using three servos and a Basic Stamp 2. It can do most of the moves of the 16 servo hexapods at one tenth the price. Next step is to add radio control and maybe a camera.”

Butch is a 71 year old, retired mechanical engineer. He says, “I have always had an interest in electronics, got a ham license 40 years ago, and have flown RC planes for the last 25 years.” He got into robotics after buying a Basic Stamp II and workbook. He built “Walkin’ Sticks” after being shocked at the price of commercial hexapod robots.

Walkin’ Sticks wins:

Vex Dual Controller Starter Bundle with RobotC (donated by Vex Robotics) ($500 USD!)

Congratulations to you all! Below is the list of the top 15 by score. The results were very close! You’ll notice that our grand prize winner, Walkin’ Sticks, was actually 3rd place by score, but due to import/export restrictions, the Grand Prize can only go to a US resident.

Top Winners:

[via Facebook]

Jason Lentz has an amazing cardboard robot costume, and frequents events like Burning man and the recent Maker Fair in SF. He has quite a collection of robot suit iterations in his Flickr page, and if you’re feeling envious, you can buy one of his robot arms on Etsy for a mere $85 USD or attempt to make your own with his provided schematics. You can also check out Jason’s fan page on Facebook.

[Via io9 via Make]

While doing my morning reading, I came across this gem of a device. It’s a DB9 pin-compatible USB port. That means for every board you have that originally took a DB9-style serial port, you can now drop in this device and have USB access instead. Inside the connector is FTDI’s ubiquitous USB-to-serial converter chip. Too bad it’s taken so long for something like this to show up. I can recall about 5 years ago when just about every robotic kit needed a serial port instead of USB. Thankfully things have begun to change, but this could be a great add-on to any legacy boards you find around the house or lab.

You can read the datasheet here.

[Via Electronics-Lab]

Check out some of the new robots added to RobotBox. For those that don’t know, RobotBox is a new community website for robot builders to show off their projects and inspire other builders. You can add your robot here.

From the same folks that brought us the Wild World of Robots, comes the Cyborgs On The Screen infographic. Full graphic after the jump.

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Mass High Tech has posted an interview with iRobot’s CEO, Colin Angle, on their plans for the future. Angle discusses their plans to combat the “demographic shift” of a 4:1 caregiver to care-needer ratio to a 1:1 ratio in the next 20 years. In other words, in the next 20 years, there will be a huge need for people or robots to take care of the elderly. iRobot is now focusing on how to help people perform physical tasks that may become difficult as we age. They are starting with plans for a “robot buddy” – probably much like the iRobot ConnectR prototype from a few years back. The new initial products will have a consumer focus, but will leverage government funding to make them cost effective.

As for other home innovations, Angle says, “We’re not done there by any stretch of the imagination.”

What do you think will be the next cool robot to come out of iRobot?

[Via @iRobotSPARK via @Transbotica]

I’m pleased to bring GoRobotics an exclusive interview with Angelica Lim of Kyoto University. When I first started writing here at GoRobotics, one of my goals that I stated was to bring more compelling academic research to the general public and enthusiasts because behind lots of jargon and hidden in some grad student’s lab somewhere is a robot waiting for it’s chance in the spotlight.

Let’s get right into things with Angelica.

How did you end up a roboticist? Was it a childhood dream?

I had no idea I wanted to be a roboticist when I was a kid. It started when I was on exchange in France, doing a year of Computer Science classes at the University of Nice. One of our projects was to pick amongst research topics proposed by faculty members, and “Build a Data Server for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)” was one of them. I ended up choosing that on a whim, and our team did a pretty good job coding it up in C++ under her specs. I got called back the next year to help integrate it with a real “live” AUV for a competition in England, and I was hooked. I liked it so much that I put together the robotics team back home in Canada. That was my second robotics competition – hopefully not my last!

How did you end up in Japan working on robots?
The main reason I wanted to come to Japan was simply because the hardware is much more advanced and easy to acquire. Full-size humanoid research platforms have been out in Japan for almost a decade. Only now are companies like Willow Garage starting to gain traction in North America.

On a more personal level, I also felt like my research options would be limited in North America. In the US, robotics research is heavily funded by the military, and therefore it seemed to me, at least that my research would have to conform to very serious and grave goals in order to gain funding. In Japan, robotics applications sound less like “Big Dog” and more like “RIBA Nurse Robot” and “Fan Dancing Robots” . I prefer the Japanese outlook on a future with robots. Does that make sense?

More after the jump …

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