Shuffling Robot

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Instead of having my humanoid completely lift its foot off the ground, it “shuffles”. At least one part of the foot remains in contact with the ground. (It does work when there is no ground underneath the foot, though)

I finished the right leg on Tuesday… I worked on the left one today, and will hopefully finish it off tomorrow so I can spend some time on it on Saturday (and make an insightful blog post for once)

What I’m interested in seeing is what is the maximum speed the robot can go at, without tipping over. Since I’m coding it in slow-motion, I may not account for all of the possible moving parts when the robot is going faster.

Robot motion is pretty cool stuff- it looks easy, but it really isn’t

I’ve also been working on a few other things… More on that (hopefully) tomorrow or Hallowe’en.

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

Humanoid Walk

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, October 25th, 2008

This entire week I have been working on MANOI! (and iPhone apps)
I discarded the idea of having a separate TX line- as the SoftwareSerial stuff never worked properly.
Right now I’m in the process of mapping out a way for the humanoid to walk. It’s intensely difficult… So, I’m doing it with pencil and paper… then I’ll code it into the Arduino, and find a protractor to double check all the angles.

(Hey- my plan sounds FANTASTIC in theory! I guess this will mean I will end up doing everything BUT the plan )

I’ll probably make a back-dated blog post on Wednesday as that is when I got the robot to balanced, and it’s a pretty significant milestone
My “jello world” iPhone app is coming along nicely. I like it a lot, hopefully I’ll be putting it up in the App Store in the middle of next week

Posted in: MANOI, Programming, Projects, Robot.

Friday Night MANOI!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, April 25th, 2008

W00T W00T!

This week’s Friday Night MANOI was dedicated to the Cylon contest on MAKE. Since I only found out about it on Tuesdayish, and the deadline is pretty soonish, I had to come up with something QUICK. I have a humanoid, MANOI, and I do have artistic skills… so I came up with Paper Cylon!

Why Paper Cylon, though? Remember Paper Mario? That game was so uber cool, and fun. What if there were Paper Cylons? That would be pretty funny. Although what I made will be improved on later dates, I think it may hit the nail on the head for random creativity.

I took lots of photos, I like Paper Cylon!

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

RoboPhilo vs i-SOBOT maybe …?

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, December 8th, 2007

We have seen two pretty cool and inexpensive humanoids released in the past few months, but which one will be more popular for the holidays?

RoboPhilo comes in two configurations, a fully assembled version ready to walk for under $500, and a kit version for under $400.

(Store is here)

Relatively affordable at $300, i-Sobot has 17 motors, can recognize spoken words and be controlled remotely, making the walking, somersaulting, karate-chopping robot as close to a humanoid as toys get.

It seems that the i-SOBOT is cooler, yet the RoboPhilo might be less of a toy and more advanced. I still <3 my MANOI though
Link and Link ^^.

Posted in: News, Robot News.