Robots and Physical Computing

Up to this point the junk bot building has largely being about building a moving (or drawing) 'bot' moved by vibration - limited control, but fun.  A  Nuffield funded bursary studen t, Hayden Tetley,  has being working within staff from the University of Northampton on whether LEGO 8547: Mindstorms NXT 2.0: Robot or Raspberry Pi based solutions can be incorporated with the bot to add some control of the movement (still by vibration). Idea One  Is to add a LEGO NXT brick, to move a junkbot similar.The motor and broken propeller combination in the earlier junkbots is replaced with the NXT brick and LEGO motor. A good potential feature is it a self-contained unit with power and control together, as well as being potentially fairly simple to set-up. This is the focus of this post.  Here are some videos showing idea one in action using LEGO motors, brick and the software that comes with the LEGO 8547: Mindstorms NXT 2.0: Robot : For more information on how t...

In the previous blog posts for this 'series' "It is a good time...."  Post 1 looked at the hardware unpinning some of this positive rise in robots; Post 2 looked at social robots; Post 3 looked at a collection of small robots; This post contin ues  with small robot idea a bit more, looking at some of the other robots I have been fortunate to be able to play with. The opinions are from a personal point of view of playing with them, but comments are very welcome. Kbots The kilobots ( http://www.k-team.com/mobile-robotics-products/kilobot )were designed to be relatively low-cost devices specifically designed for work on swarm/collective intelligence experiments. Developed at Harvard University as a scalable system to program groups of robots (now into the thousands) ( http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/ssr/projects/progSA/kilobot.html ). Individually these are quite simple units, they move by vibration. The real advantage, in my opinion, of the system though i...