Robot Living

Our buddy Harold has created another amazing robot called Mercury. This armadillo like robot is created out of parts from an old Sony Playstation among other things. The outer shell and battery are from the Playstation. The actual internal organs or circuitry is based on a design by Wilf Ritger. Mercury is a speedy fellow that loves to chase light. For more on BEAM robots visit our building robots page here. For those who want to make one, Harold has complete schematics and some movies on his website. Check out all the action here.

We all know that iRobot has teamed up with Taser to create a taser wielding packbot. If you do not think this is a very dangerous or scary idea, then watch the following video put forth by Taser here. As you can see from the screen grab, it’s another showdown between man and machine. Sound familiar?

For now they say it will not be autonomous and that humans will have to push the trigger button. But they also hope to make these robots completely autonomous in the future. What happens if the taser equipped robot gets severed in half? Will it continue firing tasers like the Terminator crawling towards it prey while also severed in half? Also, how will it decide who or whom is an appropriate target? How does it know the difference between “us” and “them”? Watch the short video before making up your mind in this months poll.

For those of you who missed the RoboCup in Atlanta like we did, we give you Rudi. He is from team NimbRo in Germany. Part of the kid size humanoid class, Rudi is 60cm tall and weighs 4kg. He also sports 3 wide angle cameras and an attitude sensor? We’re not quite sure what an attitude sensor is, but team NimbRo did manage to defeat team Osaka 8 to 6 in the Kid Size 2 on 2 division at RoboCup finals this year. Eventually roboticists hope to create a humanoid robot capable of playing against real humans. Who would win in a 2 on 2 game with David Beckham and Ronaldo on one side and a larger Rudi and his teammate on the other?

Complete list of winners here. Link to NimbRo here. Link to video of final game here.

RobuDog, pictured on the right, was unveiled at the Robocup in Atlanta is made by the French company Robosoft. This robotic dog features, Wi-fi, 17 servos, infrared sensors, an intelligent video camera and more. Pre-ordering is going on now and one can be had for roughly $4397.

On the other hand we have Sony’s Aibo. Unfortunately Sony has discontinued making this as of March 2006 so they may be hard to find. Well, we think Aibo certainly looks cuter, while Robudog’s egghead makes it look alien and at $4300, that’s an expensive alien. So who’s the new top dog? You decide. Link to official Aibo website. Link to Robosoft via (Engadget)