The Nuvation Robot was the winner of the People's Choice Award in the Flexis AC Face-Off. The demonstration featured a robot playing air hockey, and it was using Freescale’s 32-bit ColdFire processor and Flexis AC microcontrollers as its processing unit.
An overhead camera served as the robot's eyes, and it gave the human players a good challenge.
Very cool. Now if only they had two robots to compete against each other. Check out the video below.
The Crabfu Motion Works guys have struck again, and this time they have built a small robotic tortoise. The Crabfu Tortoise bot behaves like its namesake, poking along on the ground using four micro servos to control its legs and head.
The control is very simple, each servo is independently controlled by a channel on a remote control, allowing the user to get creative when it comes to moving the small quadraped. The legs are tied in pairs, and you control the tilt and shift of the pair. Fun project, and the effort gets bonus points for using technology to mildly harass a cat.
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Ever see the episode of Family Guy where Peter had his own them music? While that was a cartoon and easy to add a soundtrack, the A.M.P.Bot can help you do that in real life. The unit will follow you around, playing your favorite music. The robot even has hand controls in case the theme music needs a quick bump for the occasion.
The A.M.P.Bot (“Automated Music Personality”) is your own personal robotic buddy with a boom box. The 29″ robot features a self-balancing gyroscopic system and a follow mode that will follow you and keep the speakers pointed at you at all times.
A.M.P.Bot incorporates obstacle avoidance systems to avoid steps and walls, and as it travels the musical bot will more or less dance to the beat, providing its own LED based light show. A 12 watt amp and three speakers push out the music, and A.M.P.Bot’s hands serve as mixers and special effects generators. The A.M.P.Bot will be available in the States this October from Hasbro’s Tiger Electronics, with an expected retail price around $500.
We have a video that shows a da Vinci "tele-surgery" robotic surgical system creating an origami crane that is actually smaller than a penny.
The video is pretty amazing considering the size of the paper being folded and the sizes of the folds needed. It is interesting to note how the scale of the process changes when viewing it up close.
I can't say that all of my fears about having a virtual presence doctor doing operations have been erased, but as long as they have a battery backup, use a great connection backbone, and do not have the system running on Windows I might consider it as an option.
Video shows after the jump. [more]
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