Tribotix - News & Interesting Robotic stuff ....

Well it's Christmas Eve and we have finally finished our first Robot Bear made entirely out of RX modules. So, I decided to take a few pictures of both our bears - these can be viewed in the 'linked album' below.

Robot Bear Images

The new RX Robot Bear is now on his/her way to Ireland - lets hope it arrives safely and there is a Guiness waiting for him/her.

P.S. we have to think of a name for the Robot Bear - anyone have any ideas?

On December 11th, 12th & 13th Tribotix presented a 2hr presentation/workshop for 180 Year 9 Girls. The girls were in Newcastle as part of the 'Summer School 2007', which is a program ran by the University of Newcastle to encourage young girls to consider careers in Science, Engineering and IT.

We tried to make to make the presentation/workshop as interesting and hands on as possible. The highlight was a game of 3vs3 Robot Dog Soccer. We provided 6 Robot Dogs made from the Bioloid Kit, we then modified the CM5 to add Bluetooth. Using a PC with a LabView VI and a USB Bluetooth Dongle the girls where then able to remotely control the robot dogs.



The video above shows some of this game, as well as me (I made it on the TV, my 15 seconds of fame) showing the girls our robot bear.

Was the game of Robot Dog soccer a success? Well, yes and no - the Robot Dogs legs kept falling off. There is a weakness where the 2 brackets connect (via 4 M2.5 screws) - these screws work there way loose as the Robot Dogs 'jump' around. This could have been fixed by some loctite BUT these are Bioloids we re-use so loctite was not an option. It was alot of fun though ....

On Wednesday (5/12/07) the Newcastle Morning Herald (NMH) took some photo's of the Robot Bear, Micheal Dickinson (body suit designer) and me. The photographer from the NMH was kind enough to give us copies of some of the photo's, these can be seen in the 'linked album' below.

Photo's from NHM Photo Shoot

The article itself was titled 'Logical to put robot in school' and was published on the following Friday (7/12/07). A scanned copy of the article can also be found in the 'linked album'.

Robotis have been talking for sometime about their CycloidII follow-up, called the URIA or Ubiquitous Robotic Information Assistant - now that is a mouthful. This was originally due for release in Nov07 but we haven't had confirmation yet when it will be available to us. A picture of an early prototype is shown below.



Aweb site called DigInfo.tv (Daily Video News from Japan) have put together an interesting story on the URIA. The video can be seen at their web site or by clicking on the image below:



The following text is copied from their site: "Ubiquitous Robotic Information Assistant or URIA was developed by Korean Company ROBOTIS to help researchers by providing a robot with a wide array of capabilities and sensors in order to gather information. URIA has a USB port, LAN, VGA out and Wifi capabilities to send and receive data from its microphone, USB camera or many other sensors. URIA has an embedded PC that runs Windows XP and can display information on the LCD screen built into its chest. The many actuators in the joints of URIA use Dynamixel all in one actuators which can provide information about position, speed internal temperature and input voltage. Along with that information, there is a passive infrared sensor, an FSR and a 6 axis gyro sensor so researchers can gather a variety of information. At a height of 57 cm and weighing 5.5 kgs, URIA has good stability even on uneven terrain."

Can't wait till we get to have a play with this ....

Well, we've decided that a Blog would be the best way to keep everyone updated with what's new at Tribotix - editing our html based pages gets a little 'clumsy', so we are going to see if a Blog is any more efficient.

So, this is our first post - stay tuned for more .... hopefully on a daily basis, provided there is something interesting to say.