Modular robotics now for sale

A very cool project from Cornell with modular articulated joints self-organizing robot now have a commercial similar version!
Check the video:


The commercial version is called Cubelets!

MIT swarm of oil cleaners

Guys from the M.I.T. Senseable City Lab developed a swarm of oil cleaners based on solar energy. Very cool! (sorry the rush, I'm preparing the great news to put on the blog!)

A Candidate for Mechanical Platform

Browsing some stuff at online shops I stumbled with Merlin Robotics Miabot , It's not the ideal thing but it can be extended thanks to some IOs to it's control board.

It's a also a little expensive for what it is, but maybe it will worth. The other option is creating a robot from scratch, what is more fun but will take more time (a LOT more) ...

I'm very tempted to buy one of those just to check it out!

A lot of designs for the extension board to run eLua and give the self-charging abilities come to my mind...

Off Topic: Robot Motion

This is a little off topic, but motion control on industrial manipulators is an awesome area too so it deserve some space =).

It's quite hard to achieve precision and speed simultaneously, most because of inaccurate position sensors (the most common technique to remove the dependency of speed is a dynamic linearization, or better, a linearization of the robot dynamics by feedback from sensors)

This is a demo by ABB robotics posted originally at Hack a day some months ago...

Behold awesomeness:

Army of Lawnbots

While I have no advances in my project (I decided to not post, explicitly, about my procrastination habits) here are some interesting news about DIY robots:

Just viewed the Hackaday post about the Lawnbot400, a robot lawnmower.
Very nice!
Imagine a bunch of those moving in a synchronized way on big, irregular, field...