There is no doubt that the future of robotics is 3D printing and open-source license for both software and hardware. Such robots are already a reality as we had already reported. This group of alternatives to Nao the humanoid from Aldebaran Robotics has grown a little more bigger with advent of Jimmy (see Videos 1, […]
Category: DIY & Tutorials
How to Customize Your Turtlebot
This is a continuation of our series on interesting stuff we saw at innorobo 2014. This time, the focus is on the turtlebot, the robotic friend of so many ROS fans. At innorobo there were some cool demos featuring hacked versions of the turtle. Some students stacked the structure of many turtlebots on a single […]
Virtual Machine with ROS Hydro Medusa Pre-Installed
It’s now our tradition to issue virtual machines with ROS pre-installed. We have already done it for ROS Fuerte and for ROS Groovy. Today it is ROS Hydro’s turn. We have chosen to stick with Ubunutu 12.04. (Precise). This is because 12.04 is an LTS version, which means Long-Term Support. The Ubuntu community will be […]
A Robotic Elevator using Lego & Arduino – Part 4
Part 1: Mechanical Design Basics. Part 2: Balancing the Elevator. Part 3: Electronics (optocoupler, H-Bridge, and more). Part 4 (current): Software to control the Arduino. In this last part, we will be describing the Arduino software that controls our Lego elevator. But, let’s first define the desired behavior. As we have described in the part […]
Make Robots that Maximize Their Future Options
One of the challenges that thinkers have been facing for decades is defining intelligence. Without such a definition, it’s hard to measure intelligence or to make truly intelligent robots. In his TED talk (see Video below), Alex Wissner-Gross introduces an equation that is supposed to provide a concrete, yet general answer. Wissner-Gross defines intelligence as […]
A Robotic Elevator using Lego & Arduino – Part 3
Part 1: Mechanical Design Basics. Part 2: Balancing the Elevator. Part 3 (current): Electronics (optocoupler, H-Bridge, and more). Part 4: Software to control the Arduino. In the first two parts of this series, we have introduced the mechanics of our Lego-based elevator and we discussed how to balance it to lift some load. Today, we […]
Free Online Course on Control of Mobile Robots
Wanna learn how to make mobile robots? This free online course entitled “Control of Mobile Robots” is for you (see Video 1). The tutor is Dr. Magnus Egerstedt, a Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. For 7 weeks, he will be introducing concepts from control theory, and how to map them […]
Hijack AR Drones using SkyJack
Wana play a trick to your friends? Use SkyJack a software that takes over the control software of AR Drones. It analyzes raw Wifi data packets to perform the drone hijacking. The video below by Samy Kamkar gives more details about how it works. The code is freely downloadable from GitHub. Hope that Amazon and […]
A Robotic Elevator using Lego & Arduino – Part1
Part 1 (current): Mechanical Design Basics. Part 2: Balancing the Elevator. Part 3: Electronics (optocoupler, H-Bridge, and more) Part 4: Software to control the Arduino Recently, we scavenged an old Lego Mindstorms 1.5 set. It’s fully functional, but the RCX 1.5 Lego software is obsolete and does not run on recent Operating Systems. Besides, the […]
Sensor Scanner for Android: List and Watch your Smartphone Sensors
It is no scoop that Smartphones are attractive for robotics. They gather in a small case a display, wireless for communication, computing capabilities, and a bunch of sensors. That’s cool! But, you might be using a secondhand device, and you don’t know what sensors are available, or you may want to check if any is […]