One of the cutests robots showcased at Innorobo 2014 is Elisa-3 a two-wheeled mini-robot by GCtronic a spin-off of the Autonomous System Lab at the EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne). This little brother of the e-puck robot also targets the education and research community. The cylindrical small case (5 cm of diameter and […]
How to Customize Your Turtlebot
This is a continuation of our series on interesting stuff we saw at innorobo 2014. This time, the focus is on the turtlebot, the robotic friend of so many ROS fans. At innorobo there were some cool demos featuring hacked versions of the turtle. Some students stacked the structure of many turtlebots on a single […]
Elysium the Movie
If you are looking for a movie with spaceships, humanoid robots, exoskeletons, drones, and brain-machine interfaces Elysium is for you. Although robots are not at the center of the plot, they are taking an important part of it. The story takes place in the year 2154. The very wealthy live on a man-made space station […]
Virtual Machine with ROS Hydro Medusa Pre-Installed
It’s now our tradition to issue virtual machines with ROS pre-installed. We have already done it for ROS Fuerte and for ROS Groovy. Today it is ROS Hydro’s turn. We have chosen to stick with Ubunutu 12.04. (Precise). This is because 12.04 is an LTS version, which means Long-Term Support. The Ubuntu community will be […]
A Robotic Elevator using Lego & Arduino – Part 4
Part 1: Mechanical Design Basics. Part 2: Balancing the Elevator. Part 3: Electronics (optocoupler, H-Bridge, and more). Part 4 (current): Software to control the Arduino. In this last part, we will be describing the Arduino software that controls our Lego elevator. But, let’s first define the desired behavior. As we have described in the part […]
Make Robots that Maximize Their Future Options
One of the challenges that thinkers have been facing for decades is defining intelligence. Without such a definition, it’s hard to measure intelligence or to make truly intelligent robots. In his TED talk (see Video below), Alex Wissner-Gross introduces an equation that is supposed to provide a concrete, yet general answer. Wissner-Gross defines intelligence as […]
A Robotic Elevator using Lego & Arduino – Part 3
Part 1: Mechanical Design Basics. Part 2: Balancing the Elevator. Part 3 (current): Electronics (optocoupler, H-Bridge, and more). Part 4: Software to control the Arduino. In the first two parts of this series, we have introduced the mechanics of our Lego-based elevator and we discussed how to balance it to lift some load. Today, we […]
Free Online Course on Control of Mobile Robots
Wanna learn how to make mobile robots? This free online course entitled “Control of Mobile Robots” is for you (see Video 1). The tutor is Dr. Magnus Egerstedt, a Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. For 7 weeks, he will be introducing concepts from control theory, and how to map them […]
Roomba 880 vs. Neato XV Signature Pro
Update: Checkout our review of BotVac Connected the latest robotic vacuum from Neato Robotics and how it compares to the Roomba 980 by iRobot. Why buying a vacuum robot? To make your life easier, of course! Ideally, it should do its job silently and let you enjoy saved time in a clean environment. But, which […]
Hijack AR Drones using SkyJack
Wana play a trick to your friends? Use SkyJack a software that takes over the control software of AR Drones. It analyzes raw Wifi data packets to perform the drone hijacking. The video below by Samy Kamkar gives more details about how it works. The code is freely downloadable from GitHub. Hope that Amazon and […]