Robots and Physical Computing

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...

An overview of using Lego RCX  robots for teaching neural networks present at workshop in 2011. Derby presentation from Scott Turner The video below shows the robot trying out sets of weights for two neurones, until a set of weights are found that enable the robot to go around the circle. As a part of a set of tools I have found the following useful for teaching the principles of simple neurones.  Example code: import josx.platform.rcx.*; public class annlf{  public static void main(String[] args)  {   int w[][] ={//put weights here};   int o[]={1,1};   int s1,s2,res1,res2;   int sensor1=0,sensor2=0;   robot_1 tom=new robot_1();   Sensor.S1.activate();   Sensor.S3.activate();   for(;;){    sensor1=Sensor.S1.readValue();    sensor2=Sensor.S3.readValue();    LCD.showNumber(sensor1); ...