Korean Bipedal Robot Kit 190
The Black Dragon writes "This has got to be the coolest thing I've seen in a while. It's a bipedal (walks on two legs) robot that you can put together yourself and program with movements. The site is in Korean, but from what I've been able to get from translators and currency exchange, it'll cost about $1,400. (There's a movie embedded half way down.)" Gizmodo has a blurb.
Most awesome robot EVER... (Score:3, Interesting)
Lego my eggo (Score:4, Interesting)
The legos were a lot of fun, but the batteries for the remote/receiver never lasted that long.
This could be a nice next-generation version of the lego system, or it could turn into (brace yourself) this [irobotmovie.com].
Get Something Cheaper (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, you can get a cheaper one. They are not as good, but... they're cheaper. Lynxmotion's Biped [lynxmotion.com], or the less fancy Parallax Todler [parallax.com].
...slight inaccuracy... (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? I had no idea that 17 different servos could be powered by one motor. How interesting.
In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic.
Re:Another Robot... (Score:1, Interesting)
I'll go for the affordable Korean model, thank you.
Heathkit HERO (Score:4, Interesting)
We had one in school, our science teacher had buddies at Heathkit. You programmed it in assembly, via a keypad on the top of the robot. I don't even remember if there was a way to load an instruction set into it, until later models came along.
There is a website [dsavage.net] dedicated to the good ol Hero. Back then (late 1980s) we were sure that by 2004 we'd all be living with robots like the ones in the new I,Robot movie. I guess it didn't really happen.
It would be cool if the I,Robot bad guy (only seen the trailer, they got THAT GUY, who always plays villans, to play the villan) had a HERO on his desk or something. Esp. since the USR company in the movie is supposed to be in Chicago, right across the lake and home of several Zenith facilities.
RoboSapien (Score:3, Interesting)
If that's not screaming to be hacked, hooked to a linux box, and used to terrify the cat, I don't know what is. And at 1/14th the price of the Korean `bot. It's not a kit though, which I know is a negative on Slashdot...
something similiar in the uk (Score:2, Interesting)
Another site (Score:3, Interesting)
Kopropo.com [kopropo.com]
Photos of these guys at the recent Robolympics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Static or dynamic? (Score:2, Interesting)
In the robotics group at Stanford they're working on human motion [stanford.edu]. Dynamic balancing is one of the issues they seem to have solved, and really well at that. Well, OK, it's "only" in simulation, but imagine plugging those algorithms into a real robot...
Last year I attended a talk about this project at a conference, and the videos were really amazing. Unfortunatley, the 'view movies' link at the bottom does not work for me -- maybe limited to their intranet?
Re:Is it possible to build one cheaper ? (Score:3, Interesting)
The only thing that appears to be special about the servos is the position sensing. Based on someones translation of the page, you can program the robot by positioning its limbs and clicking a mouse button.
Since the servos only have three leads coming out of them (white, black and red like a regular RC servo) I'm going to guess that the servos are gutted of their electronics and their functionality is integrated into the controller. This would benefit the robot by reducing unecessary weight at the limbs (those nifty kung f u moves) and allow you to sense the positions of the limbs.
In a homebrew project the internal electronics in the servo are what make RC servos so attractive. You can get a positionable, speed regulated geartrain in a very compact package for very little money compared to fabricating your own. So unless you modify each servo you would have to give up the position sensing programability (which I could live with).
That said, if my guess is correct, it may be easier to make one of these things self balancing than previously thought since half the needed functionality is there (positioning).