Category Archives: robotics

‘Robot Journalist’ out-writes human sports reporter

Here’s an article from NPR noting the progress that’s been made in the little known area of robotic writing. In this account a software program by the Narrative Science company was able to write a sports story combining facts and highlighting topics appropriately, producing an article judged superior to the work of a human writer […]

TurtleBot: a Kinect on wheels

Willow Garage has announced plans for the release of their TurtleBot robot kit. The kit is a combination of their iRobot Create, a Kinect, netbook, and gyro integrated together. Picture an Asus netbook riding on a Roomba with top-mounted Kinect for cyber vision all controlled by open source software and capable of running your own […]

Mini robot design using CoolRunner-II CPLD

It’s National Robotics Week, and what would National Robotics Week be without a CPLD based mini robot design? Here’s a mini robot design project outline (PDF!) found in the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology journal. While it’s not a “how to” style article (no schematic/code provided), it describes the advantages of using CPLDs […]

iPad/Kinect/HTML5 controlled toy car

Gaurav Manek likes to work with Arduino and experiment with different means of remote control. His latest project involves several new technologies relating to gesture- and web-based control. He writes: This project extends a simple remote-controlled car, allowing it to be controlled by an iPad or by hand gestures. This project builds on the Arduino […]

MIT uses kinect on quadcopter

MIT has developed a system using the Microsoft Kinect as part of an autonomous flight controller, allowing navigation and mapping when a gps signal is not available. At MIT, we have developed a real-time visual odometry system that can use a Kinect to provide fast and accurate estimates of a vehicle’s 3D trajectory. This system […]

Convert the Chumby serial port into two PWM outputs

Osman Eralp of Ozbots writes: When I was building my latest Chumby-based robot, I didn’t need the serial port, but I did want PWM signals to control the robot’s wheel motors. Fortunately, the processor pins that are used for the serial (UART) TX and RX pins are multiplexed with PWM outputs. With the proper commands, […]

Hacking toy RC cars

Project Lab provides the details on how to produce a wireless robotics platform using a cheap RC toy vehicle, Arduino, XBee and Processing. The vehicle is completely controlled by the code running on the remote computer which allows very rapid prototyping of the code to tell the vehicle what to do and how to react […]

Android controls robot with Bluetooth

PocketMagic demos the use of an Android phone’s Bluetooth capability to transmit commands to a module interfaced through an Atmega8 with a robot car. While this project controls a Perseus 3 robot platform, the code and circuit could be easily adapted to use with any device that could be interfaced with the Atmega8, and the […]