MANOI on Discovery Channel – Daily Planet!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, December 18th, 2009

On December 17th, MANOI made its TV-screen ‘debut’ to gazillions of viewers in Canada! Daily Planet, a news style of a show for DIY’ers and scientists, featured MANOI’s holiday Xtravaganza warmup in the PlanetYou clip!

You can see the clip online by clicking here. It’s after the iPhone App part. ^_^

It was pretty awesome to see MANOI on TV, and a great way to ring out the year. WOOT!

The actual version of MANOI’s Holiday Xtravaganza will be posted soon

Posted in: MANOI, News, Projects, Robot, Robot News.

Robo Pumpkin!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, November 1st, 2009

Thursday (last week) was a pretty awesome day. I had a good project status for my COSI for credit, I learnt more about LaTeX (and started to typeset my summer research paper) thanks to Zach’s presentation, and there was a pumpkin carving contest for the robotics floor!

Last year I spent a lot of time soldering LEDs and shrink wrapping them, exactly for the purpose of pumpkin decorating!

This year I did one of those ‘etching’ carves of a robot, and used my LEDs to make it more awesome!

It looks pretty cool. Maybe next year I’ll go all out and add a distance sensor and a speaker so that it can sense if something approaches it, then play creepy music/sounds

Here’s a video of the pumpkin in action…

The pumpkin ended up landing itself in COSI for the holiday Hopefully spreading the Halloween joy of computer science to everyone!

Posted in: Art, Projects.

RoboGlyphs

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, April 19th, 2009

Lately, I have been trying to come up with ideas that would allow me to do a similar ‘gig’ as last year- when I was accepted to the Stanford program to learn AI.

Some may remember, some may not — some might not even know. Last year I was accepted into the Stanford University Education Program for Gifted Youth under the Artificial Intelligence program. Of course, it wasn’t very affordable. I created these Styrofoam vibrobots called Styrobots. Thanks to numerous efforts of the robotics community as a whole, we raised enough money for me to attend.

This year, I’m going to WWDC and RoboGames. I didn’t apply to any academic programs – aka the CMU Summer Robotics Institute & NASA’s Robotics Academy because they require US Citizenship, or something of the like.

WWDC and RoboGames are both in SF, CA, and around the same time period!

The idea I came up with are RoboGlyphs! They are small laser-etched ‘glyphs’ that can connect with other glyphs. The first three that I will be releasing are the 3 Laws of Robotics.

Here are some photos:

They look absolutely stunning in person!

However, this is not all that I plan to do with the RoboGlyphs. I plan to somehow attach a LED so that it can illuminate the words, so they can be seen in the dark.

I’m hoping to release these on Etsy around the first week of May. Keep an eye out!

Posted in: Art, Other, Projects.