This little gem came to me courtesy of my friend Greg Baker, who is a lecturer in Computer Science at Simon Fraser University. Thanks Greg! This one was too cool to pass up.

Gåågle – It’s not as weird to pronounce as you’d think. It’s actually pronounced like Google and you’ll begin to see why soon enough. Gåågle Bot is a modified remote-control Roomba that bears a webcam, fueled by real-time AJAX calls that zips around taking pictures and indexing the real world as it sees it. Vacuum, index. I love efficiency!

The name Gåågle Bot is a play on the words gå and google bot. The Swedish word for go is gå. Googlebot, is the name of Google’s web indexer. If you don’t know what Google is, you are either lying or out of luck. Hence Gåågle Bot is a “going” indexer, indexing the real world around us while vacuuming your home at the same time! Can’t find that library book that is due tomorrow? Relax, just gåågle it!

Excited about this bot? Head over here and give it a try. There is also a pretty nifty video as well showing the bot in action. The main site has all of the components listed, the source code, and other tidbits to get you started building your own remote-control crawler.

Matt Bunting’s story should be inspiring to anyone out there who builds robots. You see, Matt was just your average robot builder (well, maybe above average), until Intel (yes, that Intel) spotted one of his creations and decided they wanted to use it as a showcase item for their latest push into embedded Atom processors. Bunting’s hexapod robot, or the Intel Hexapod now, is now a bit of a celebrity and tours around the country with Intel strutting its six-legged stuff.

Keep reading for the rest of the story.

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A french company, named Parrot, unveiled an iPhone controlled, wifi-enabled, quadrocopter at CES 2010.  The robot, called the AR.Drone, is a sophisticated and snazzy quadrocopter that is controlled via an iPhone or iPod Touch over a wifi connection. The AR.Drone has two onboard cameras, one of which streams live video back to the iPod screen, an ultrasonic altimeter, and a gyro/accelerometer based stabilization system. The drone also has a neat “augmented reality” system that overlays computer generated graphics and objects on the video feed, to allow users to play games or compete against each other with multiple AR.Drones. CNet says, “You’ll get about 15 minutes of battery-powered fun on a one-hour charge”, and reports that the vehicle will retail for around $500.

The most interesting part of the AR.Drone is that the wifi interface will have an API! This means that there is significant potential for building complex robotics projects using an inexpensive flying system (robot swarms, anyone?). Parrot has already created a developers website and has uploaded demo code for getting started with programming for the AR.Drone.

Update: Chris at DIYDrones has some unboxing photos of the AR.Drone.

More images after the jump.

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As 2009 comes to a close it’s time once again for the Robot Christmas Gift List! We’re featuring a few of the same, but mostly new, things since the 2008 Robot Christmas Gift Guide. We’ll be featuring 10 items that would make great gifts for the robot lover in your life. Prices range from $10 to $900 dollars, so everyone’s budget should be covered!

Parallax Scribbler – $99

The Scribbler robot from Parallax has been around for a few years but makes an excellent starting point for jumping into robotics. The solid design and lots of ability for expansion make it a good choice for someone that has basic computer skills or someone that has limited electronics knowledge and wants an easy way to get started. The robot features a basic stamp brain, several sensors – like light, floor sensors, and stall sensors – and has two hefty motors, along with a speaker and LEDs. The robot comes with several demo modes, or can be programmed using the regular Basic Stamp programming software.

Roboni-i Game Robot – $189

Roboni is a neat robotic game that uses wirelessly controlled robots. The robots can be used individually or in combination for cooperative gameplay. Roboni’s clever design also makes it tempting for the hacker in me. The Roboni has 12 IR sesors that it uses to track the other Robonis in the playing field, the basestation, and various obstacles. The robot exhibites complex behavior and actually “plays” with you. It’s a relatively new toy, so take that as you will.

LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 – $271

When LEGO released NXT in 2006 they were coming off nearly 10 years of huge success with the RIS. Many people wondered if they could repeat the trend. It looks like they did, with tons of NXT related books being released, and lots of use in education settings. LEGO has updated the NXT and released the 2.0 version, which once again raises the bar. The NXT 2.0 set features a new color sensor, which can detect 6 different colors, or be used as a RGB light emitter. LEGO also dropped the sound sensor in favor of adding a 2nd touch sensor. There is also a different selection of beams and gears and a greatly improved programming interface. The NXT Step Blog has a comparison chart of new pieces.

Pololu 3Pi Robot – $119

Similar in price and usability to the Scribbler robot, the 3Pi from Pololu has meet with favorable reviews. The 3pi has two high power (and high speed!) DC motors, a LCD screen, and has built in sensors for line-following. The robot uses an Atmel Atmega168 chip and can be programmed in C or using the Arduino firmware and programming language. Trossen Robotics calls it, “ a great first robot for ambitious beginners.”

Phoenix Hexapod Kit – starting at $969

This exceedingly impressive kit from Lynxmotion will knock your socks off! The powerful inverse kinematics engine allows for a huge array of natural walking gaits and very “creepy” looking motion. Each leg has three DOFs (degrees of freedom) and the completed kit is wirelessly controlled via a transmitter. The parts are laser cut aluminum with black anodization. So, if you’ve got some spare change lying around, this is one slick robot to purchase. Nothing says, “I love you” like a beautifully walking hexapod robot!

Terminator Salvation DVD – $9

The continuation of the Terminator saga. Reviews were mixed, but there was some definite epic robot action. Totally worth $10.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen DVD – $21

Yet another continuation. Again, epic robot battles and mixed reviews. Certainly a “fun” movie. Check your brain at the door (or couch) though.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles – The Complete Second Season – $37

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (TSCC) was quite possibly the best Sci-Fi show of the past several years. Take Battlestar Galactica off the table and you have to go back to Firefly to find something comperable. Even wtih Fox (wantonly, stupidly, foolishly, idiotically, … ) canceling the show after the 2nd season, the two seasons of the show are still well worth watching and are both intellectually stimulating, fun, and heartwrenching. The first season is available new for $17.

SolarSpeeder Kit – $27

The SolarSpeeder is a great beginner kit to demonstrate the power of solar energy. The kit requires some basic hand tools and a soldering iron, so it’s best for kids over 12.

Pleo Dinosaur – $200

Pleo is back from the ashes of bankruptcy and ready to rumble. With a new update to fix many of the original Pleo’s problems, this Pleo is still his same loveable self – just with a new company backing him. This robodino has a complex personality, can move around, use his built in camea to recognize objects, and has directional hearing. Pleo has instant repor with children and the elderly, and would make an oustanding companion for the diabled – or robot hackers.

Have anything to add to this list? Add it to the comments! What was your favorite robot gift from 2008?

Several online robot retailers are offering some sweet deals for the Thanksgiving weekend holiday, a.k.a Black Friday. If you’re looking for some great gift deals, now looks like your chance.

First up is Trossen Robotics – they’re offering 10% off all in stock items from Black Friday through Cyber Monady (Nov. 27th – 30th) with the coupon code “cyber09“. You can snag yourself nearly $30 off a RoboBoard Starter Kit ($289) or some heftying savings on a Bioloid Kit ($899) or some Hexapod kits.

Next up is Pololu Robotics and Electronics. They’re offering big sales on many items with up to 60% savings from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monady (Nov. 26th – 30th). Their popular 3Pi Robot is being sold for $50 (half off! Use coupon “BF3PI“), which is a fabulous deal if you’re quick.  Or, you could pick up a 6 channel servo controller board for only $10 (coupon “BFMAESTRO”).

Finally, Parallax is offering free shipping this weekend on orders over $100.

Get ‘em while there hot!

Update: iRobot is offering a free Dirt Dog robot with any purchase over $350 – Thursday and Friday only. Robots.net tipped us to BGMicro’s sale – 10% off front page items till the 30th of Nov.

 

 

A couple of weeks ago we reported on Jon Hyland’s NanoSeeker Micro AUV project. Today Jon posted some more details on his project and he seems to be making rapid progress. With the help of a rapid prototype machine there are now working prototypes of the vehicles in the water. The NanoSeeker has a “3-axis, solid state compass, with an integrated 3-axis accelerometer”, a bluetooth debugging interface, and runs on a ATmega328 microcontroller. The vehicle is steered via two control surfaces controlled by a Solarbotics GM15 pager gearmotor. Oh, and don’t forget that the vehicle is 6 inches long and 1.25 inches in diameter!

Video of the prototype after the jump.

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Jon Hylands, on his blog this week, posted a link to his NanoSeeker Micro AUV project. The vehicle is 6 inches long and 1.25 inches in diameter. That’s tiny! Jon plans to outfit the AUV with a 6 DOF IMU, a compass, depth sensor and an ARM based microcontroller.  You can see some pictures of the prototype here.

Good work Jon, I hope to see these things swimming soon!

Cornell University has won the 12th annual AUVSI Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition. And, according to Cornell’s tweet, second place goes to University of Victoria and 3rd to University of Rhode Island. Interestingly, these three teams weren’t even in the top 5 of last year’s compeitors (pdf), so they seem to have put in a lot of work. You can read all of the team’s technical papers here. Cornell’s, U.Vic. and URI’s papers will make interesting reading for all the 2010 competitors with an ax to grind.

Congratulations to Nova, Aerius, and Ram-Boat ‘09 and all the engineers behind them on a job well done.

After the jump are two recap videos from the 1st and 2nd days competition.

If you like this story, will you please Digg it? Thanks!

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Here’s a neat design by Nils Volker for a spherical rolling robot. The robot propels itself forward by turning about its axis, and can change the direction of motion by dynamically changing the axis of rotation. This seems to be a more efficient design than having a suspended pendulum which causes the sphereical robot to curve to one side or the other – a common design among other “ball” robots. Nils robot uses LEGO Mindstorms for electronics/mechanics and is remotely controlled via a bluetooth connection.

Nice work Nils!

More pictures/video after the jump.

[Via Robots Dreams]

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A few weeks ago, the most excellent company, SparkFun hosted an autonomous vehicle competition at their building in Builder Colorado. The competition was open to all forms of autonomous vehicles and was race around the peremeter of the buildings. Chris Anderson from DIY Drones entered a flying vehicle and won first place.

Below is a most excellent video recap of the event.

Here’s a fantastic walking robot costume for a small child. Check out the “build notes” after the jump. Just add some water or nerf guns and your kid will be the ultimate ruler of the neighborhood!

L’s chicken walking robot costume

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Roborealm has an interesting tutorial on using machine vision for obstacle avoidance in ground-based vehicles. The tutorial shows a series of image processing steps which can be chained together to detect the “highest” point in an image, based on the ground color. Presumably, that highest point is indicative of the best path to take in order to avoid the most obstacles.

The … algorithms will refer to aspects of this images and exploit attributes that are common in obstacle avoidance scenarios. For example, the ground plane assumption states that the robot is placed on a relatively flat ground (i.e. no offroading for these robots!) and that the camera is placed looking relatively straight ahead or slightly down (but not up towards the ceiling).

RoboRealm is a fascinating and powerful tool for exploring machine vision without difficult programming or an in depth knowledge of the field. It is free for personal use and comes with a number of plugins for using it with various robotic kits. If you’re curious about machine vision, it’s worth a look.

[Via TrossenRobotics]

After ten yeras, the array of creations made with the LEGO’s Mindstorms kit is pretty impressive. One of the latest things to amaze me is this NXT 3D scanner created by Philo. The device uses several motors and linear actuators to probe the surface of an object and precisely record its shape. The scanner, which can take several hours to map the surface of an (even small) object, uses a sharp needle and and a the light sensor to probe the surface of the object to scan with quite an ingeneous mechanism. Philo details the project and outlines each component on his website. Philo writes,

I am a LDraw parts author, and as such I am always interested to find new ways to model LEGO parts. Many parts have a clear geometric structure and are relatively easy to create, but parts like the frog pictured above (note: it’s the small green blob) have no defined geometric shape and are very difficult to model. I toyed for a while with the idea of a 3D scanner… The solution came with 2008 LEGO Technic sets that include a new part, the linear actuator. These nifty device convert the rotation movement of a motor into a linear movement. Coupled with the high resolution of NXT encoder, I had all the elements to build a 3D scanner, precise enough for my purpose.

There’s a video of the scanner after the jump.

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The LEGO company is producing a special, Limited Edition, version of the Mindstorms NXT brick. The brick will be black, and LEGO will only produce 1998 of them, to commemorate the creation of Mindstorms in 1998. Owners will get special goodies, like bragging rights, and special programs with the purchase of their brick.

The first LEGO MINDSTORMS products came out in the year 1998 and have since then continued to bring fun and active building and programming experiences to millions of robotic builders across the world! Why a Black NXT? Because it is cool! And looking around in the MINDSTORMS community we noticed that a Black NXT was high on the wish list among users. Once you have bought and received your new Black NXT you will get access to additional materials like a special-made program for the Black NXT, a personal certificate of ownership, wallpapers, building instructions for special models.

You can purchase one of these exclusive items from www.legoshop.com or from Amazon.

Do you remember with Mindstorms originally came out? Did you buy one then, or did you wait? I remember being almost beside myself with excitement.

[Via The Brothers Brick]

Shown below is a video of a robot that uses the perceived vanishing point of an image to navigate through a corridor. The robot, based on an iRobot Create, uses a standard webcam and video processing to locate the vanishing point of what it sees, and navigates towards that point. Such navigation works very well in office-like environments with straight walls, windows, and ceilings. The robot also uses visual clues, like orange traffic cones, to recognize specific locations.

I was responsible for vision-based navigation of the robot within the hallways. I used the vanishing points from the parallel lines present indoors to compute the robot heading. This was then fed into a controller to control the direction of the robot for navigation. The computation was made robust to change in light conditions, false detections, occlusions by a layered filtering approach that included RANSAC and least squares filtering among others.

Such navigation has some very interesting implications for simple navigation through common environments (houses, offices, shopping malls, etc.). Has anyone tried this using RoboRealm? You can read the project report (PDF) here.

[Via Hackzine]