Part 1: Mechanical Design Basics. Part 2 (current): Balancing the Elevator. Part 3: Electronics (optocoupler, H-Bridge, and more). Part 4: Software to control the Arduino. In the first part of this series, we introduced the core structure of our elevator. But, we aren’t done yet with the mechanics. As shown in Video 1, our initial […]
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A Robotic Elevator using Lego & Arduino – Part1
Part 1 (current): Mechanical Design Basics. Part 2: Balancing the Elevator. Part 3: Electronics (optocoupler, H-Bridge, and more) Part 4: Software to control the Arduino Recently, we scavenged an old Lego Mindstorms 1.5 set. It’s fully functional, but the RCX 1.5 Lego software is obsolete and does not run on recent Operating Systems. Besides, the […]
Sensor Scanner for Android: List and Watch your Smartphone Sensors
It is no scoop that Smartphones are attractive for robotics. They gather in a small case a display, wireless for communication, computing capabilities, and a bunch of sensors. That’s cool! But, you might be using a secondhand device, and you don’t know what sensors are available, or you may want to check if any is […]
NPR TED Radio Hour on Robotics
There are many cool programs broadcasted by the National Public Radio (NPR). One among our favorites is the TED Radio Hour. Every episode discusses a specific topic and provides excerpts of related TED talks. This summer, NPR rebrodcasted an episode on robotics and ethics, a subject related to our post: Yes to Robotics! No to […]
ROS Naming and Namespaces
In this tutorial, we will be talking about ROS namespaces which allow to combine nodes in ways unplanned by developers. This is actually what all ROS is about: allow building systems by connecting nodes, often developed by third parties according to your needs. This is possible thanks to a flexible node naming system. As usual, […]
Yes to Robotics! No to Killer Robots!
Most TED talks if not all are thought provoking. The one given by moral philosopher Peter Singer on effective altruism (see Video 1) at TED 2013 Longbeach (CA) is no exception. This talk is actually a call for action. We don’t need to be billionaires to help others around the world. We can either offer […]
A Robotic Dock for Your Smartphone
The idea of using a robotic dock for iPhone and iPod is not new. Back in 2009, a robot hobbyist has developed a humanoid robot named Robochan which head was an iPhone 3GS (see Video 1). The iPhone acted as a screen that displays different facial expressions. It also plays the role of the robot […]
Ready to Use Virtualized ROS Groovy
UPDATE: You might want to use a more recent version of ROS: Hydro Medusa (released on September 2013). See the corresponding post: Virtual Machine with ROS Hydro Medusa Pre-Installed. Install procedure unchanged. ROS Groovy was released on December the 31st, 2012. For those of you who just want to quickly experiment with it, we provide […]
Your First ROS based System
Many newcomers to ROS don’t know where to start. Indeed, ROS is not an application, but it is rather a robotics middleware. That is an infrastructure to run robotic software. It provides plenty of tools, libraries and packages to ease developing, managing and reusing code. In this post, we’ll go quickly through the main concepts […]
Smart Robots: Shape Matters
When designing a robot, choosing the right shape can have tremendous impact on the robot controller. This idea has been pushed to the extreme with the HexBug Nano. It has no sensors and even no controller at all! Still its behavior is really realistic and robust as shown in Video 1. Video 1: HexBug Nano […]