Thursday, June 28, 2012

Grishin Robotics Has $25 Million to Invest in Robot Startups

Article: Grishin Robotics Has $25 Million to Invest in Robot Startups

Robotics today is like the Internet in the 1990s: Fuel it with the right combination of technology, people, and money, and it will explode into a formidable new industry that will profoundly reshape people’s lives.

Putting Projects in Motion with the 555 Timer IC

Article: Putting Projects in Motion with the 555 Timer IC

Motors are the driving force behind many maker experiments, from hobby projects to more sophisticated robotics applications. Curious if it would be possible to reduce these generally complex motor controllers to a handful of common components, we set out on our latest hack, Projects in Motion: Control Three Types of Motors with 555 Timers.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Time To Apply The First Law Of Robotics

Article: Isaac Asimov would not be proud.

Seventy years ago, Asimov created the “first law of robotics,” the idea that robots of the future would obey a rule rooted deep in their programming: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” By the year 2015, as his short stories predicted, even outmoded droid models would obey that maxim.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

The Bilibot Project

The Bilibot Project started at MIT through the exploration of what could be done with the new Kinect sensor. Besides being a great sensor for gesture technology, the Kinect is a powerful robotic sensor - so much so that robotics laboratories at universities across the world are replacing their $5000 sensors with the $150 Kinect! The Bilibot project takes advantage of this new technological breakthrough to provide a research quality robot at a hobby robot's price.