Hamster powered robots are something of a running joke, but Crabfu (you remember him, right?) has managed to create a walking robot out of a kit modeled originally on Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests that’s powered by a cute n’ fluffy hamster named Princess. The first question is, of course, why would you make a robot that’s powered by a hamster? Crabfu has the answer:

That’s just stupid, which is the exact reason why I did it.

And that, right there, is one of the best possible reasons to make a uselessly cool robot.

So, the second question here is when is this thing going to get a gun? And the third question is, how soon can I swear allegiance to our new adorable little cyborg hamster overlords?

[ Crabfu ]

Remember how incredibly simple and effective that jammin’ robot coffee-balloon gripper thing was? Turns out that you can make one yourself, as Norris Labs did, with a Handi-Vac. It looks like it works nearly as well as the original, and my guess is that it’s pretty damn cheap too.

Grippers, especially grippers capable of picking up a couple geltabs without breaking them, used to be complicated and expensive. These jamming grippers, though, were a serious stroke of genius, and they’re already starting to make fine manipulation accessible to DIY roboticists on a budget.

VIA [ Norris Labs ]

Exercise is much less work if you can pawn the hard stuff off on a teleoperated robot. The system in this video is kinda like the physical master/slave system that we saw last year, combined with Willow Garage’s PR2 Kinect demo. While I’m sure this technology has at least a few practical uses, I’m personally hoping that all those humanoid robot competitions will start requiring Kinect teleoperation. Just imagine how much more entertaining it would be to watch robot combat and wildly gesticulating humans at the same time, kinda like this. And you know what, that sounds cool enough that maybe it should be made into a movie or something…

VIA [ I Heart Robotics ] and [ Robots Dreams ]

This robot is called Kunstrasen. It as designed by Sebastian Neitsch to take a vector graphic and burn it into grass (someone else’s grass, probably) using a small flamethrower. I can’t find a video of the robot in action, but here’s the end result:

Um, brilliant.

[ Kunstrasen ] VIA [ Designboom ] and [ Neatorama ]

Hobby roboticists now have a serious problem: which awesome off the shelf sensor do they use for 3D mapping, Kinect’s stereo camera system, or Neato’s LIDAR system, which has just been hacked wide open. Posting on RobotBox (presumably because of the sweet bounty that they threw down), Hash79 has provided video showing the raw distance output from a Neato XV-11′s LIDAR sensor:

The next step is for smart people to plug this hack into a module that the rest of us (who aren’t quite so smart) can readily access, like ROS. The step after that is to figure out how to find a Neato sensor without having to buy the entire robot. And the step after that is to go crazy and maybe speed up the motor and mount the sensor on a servo that scans up and down to get a whole 3D scene and damn this is going to be awesome!

VIA [ RobotBox ]

While you were stuffing your face on turkey (or forest loaf, whatever that is) and vegging out, the guys over at Utah Aerials (remember their robot ghost?)were busy constructing a flying turkey robot that drops pumpkin pie bombs. In other words, my fantasy animal.

Somehow, adding a turkey costume to a quadrotor doesn’t seem to effect its ability to achieve stable flight. Adding a pumpkin pie definitely does, but the bot manages to stay airborne long enough to achieve its mission. Kinda. Anyway, a pie make it from the sky to the ground, and that’s the important thing.

PIE!

[ Utah Aerials ]

This is just the first taste of what a hacked-up Kinect sensor is capable of… That motion capture and teleoperation system looks pretty sweet, and as Willow Garage says, they’ve basically just started messing with the capabilities of the sensor, and things are already progressing very quickly.

Kinect is $150, and the open source drivers are free. Go crazy.

[ Willow Garage ]

These little bots have slowly but surely inched centimetered (?) their way into my heart. Awww! They were created by Keiko Takahashi, and were on display at the most recent Make:Tokyo meeting at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

I can’t find too many details about how, exactly, the Meter Crawlers were constructed, but it seems like they’d be an awesome DIY project. If anyone has a clue, share the love!

[ Meter Crawlers ] VIA [ Make ]

If you can’t wait for a hacked Neato LIDAR system and you need some cheap localization and mapping hardware, you might want to take a good look at Microsoft’s Kinect system, which has already been hacked open and made available to anyone using ROS.

MIT’s Personal Robotics Group has put together the demo in the vid above, which shows an iRobot Create plus a Kinect sensor performing 3D SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) and also reacting to gesture inputs from a human, which is pretty cool. Most of the heavy lifting is done by an offboard computer, but there’s no reason that the whole system couldn’t be easily integrated into the robot itself, since I think I remember hearing that Kinect is minimally intensive when it comes to processing requirements.

This kind of thing is really, really fantastic because we’re starting to see high quality sensing systems that provide awesome data being available for what’s basically dirt cheap. Remember those DARPA Grand Challenge cars and their hundreds of thousands of dollars of ranging sensors? It was only a few years ago that 3D sensing hardware was totally, completely out of range for hobby robotics, and now, in the space of like 6 months, we’ve actually got options. Yeah, it’s piggybacking off of other tech, but there’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s only going to get better as the gaming and automotive industry invest more resources in making their machines smarter, not just faster.

Thanks Philipp!

This is Mr. T. He’s a ghost. He’s also a robot helicopter. He was built more or less from scratch by Michael Colton over at Utah Aerials, using some motors, servos, a microcontroller, cabinet hinges, and zip ties. In other words, it’s pure genius.

One important thing to keep in mind: Mr. T is way, way scarier than a real ghost, because its hands are two SPINNING BLADES OF DEATH. Run children, RUN!

[ Utah Aerials ] VIA [ Neatorama ]