SRI's Wall Climbing Robot

The news is ground breaking! In short, robots can climb walls now!




SRI International has designed an incredible wall-climbing robot which can move up a ninety degree angle. The robbot can scramble up all common building materials as it uses 'electroadhesion' to cling to the wall, generating electrostatic charges between the wall substrate and itself to keep from falling. SRI says, "The technology uses a very small amount of power (on the order of 20 microwatts/Newton weight held) and shows the ability to repeatably clamp to wall substrates that are heavily covered in dust or other debris". Truly amazing!

SRI will publicly unveil their creation this week at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Pasadena, CA

More on Electroadhesive: http://www.sri.com/rd/electroadhesion.html

SRI link: http://www.sri.com/news/releases/052008.html

A Video is available here: http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/4264594.html

Dobo's videos

Dobo can now make some complex moves, including walking. I've just uploaded some videos. You can check them out below.

Dobo showing some moves.

Dobo walking.

So, what do you think? :).

Introducing "Dobo" - My first robot dog

I am glad to introduce my first robot dog. I'm calling it "Dobo". The name 'Dobo' came from the words 'Dog robot'. Dobo is a 4 legged, 12 DOF robot which can sit down, lay, stand up, kick balls at the moment and soon will be able to walk and do many other moves (well I hope so).

Some photos and videos are better than many descriptions. So, I'm planning to post plenty of them. For now, here goes the first one.

Dobo - My first robot dog.

Dobo is in its very primary stage. I just made Dobo in the last three days (Thursday to Saturday) . It took another day to write a software that I can use to experiment and create Dobo's movements. (I shall post some screen shots of it soon). Of course, the planning took several weeks.

I'm planning to embed Dobo's movements on a on-board Microcontroller and make a wireless remote for Dobo. So Dobo will be move without a PC and with it's remote. (Well, just a thought so far). I may also include a PC based vision system in Dobo and it may able to play with colored balls and show some interactions after that.

According to my knowledge, this is the first legged robot in Bangladesh, which can move with its legs (please correct me if I'm wrong).

If you liked Dobo or want to inspire me, please leave some comments. I'll try to post more on Dobo soon.

On Feb. 12, 2008: I changed the picture to a better looking skinned one.

When robot programmers get bored.

Check out this interesting video. Very exciting but dangerous ride in a robot's arm!

CMU Researchers Develop New Type of Mobile Robot That Balances and Moves on a Ball Instead of Legs or Wheels

Ralph Hollis and Ballbot

Check it out here: http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060809_ballbot.html.

Mark Tilden

Mark Tilden with RoboSapien

Mark W. Tilden, one of the most well known guys in robotics, produces complex robotic movements from simple logic circuits, often all on the single logic chip and without a microprocessor.

Check out some of his early bugs here: http://www.beam-online.com/Robots/Galleria_other/tilden.html

RoboSapien (Robo Gorilla) is a toy-like biomorphic robot designed by Mark Tilden and produced by Wow Wee toys.

Robosapien site: http://www.wowwee.com/robosapien/robo1/robomain.html

An interesting interview with Mark is here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6567169/.

Marshall Brain's Blog - Robotic Nation Evidence

I'll post links to interesting and important blogs and web sites on computer vision, congitive computing, robotics and electronics on regular basis. So, here goes the first one.

Marshall Brain is the founder of HowStuffWorks.com. Marshall Brain maintains a very interesting blog called "Robotic Nation Evidence" along with some other popular blogs. URLs are given below:

Robotic Nation Evidence blog: http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/.
Marshall Brain's blog: http://marshallbrain.blogspot.com/

You can check out more about him in his personal web site, here http://marshallbrain.com/.

Comming soon..

Articles on the following topics are comming soon:

• Starting with hardware interfacing
• Starting with PIC Microcontrollers
• Building JDM PIC Programmers
• Programming EEPROMs
• Starting with robotics
• Understanding vision systems