Tribotix - News & Interesting Robotic stuff ....

Tribotix have been an Industry Partner of TAFE's Digi-Girl program for over 3 years now and we will be again be assisting with the delivery of the highly successful robotics program from 29th July ~ 30th July at Meadowbank TAFE. This delivery is part of National ICT Careers Week activities in NSW.

Below is a promotional video showing a sample of what happens over the 2 days.



This program is great fun, and also gives the Year 9~12 girls and insite in career opportunites in Engineering and Computer Science.

Last Month I attended TechGirls, an event organised by Youth Connections, to promote Engineering and IT options for girls. At this event I was lucky enough to meet Pia Waugh, Pia's is a very active person in the Australian Linux & Open Source communities being:

• appointed Research Co-ordinator of the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software project (ASK-OSS),
• a former President & (2003~2004) and Vice President (2005-2007) of Linux Australia, and
  
• Project Leader for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project in Australia.
  

Pia has put together a case study for HyKim on Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software (ASK-OSS) web site. It's great that people in the open-source community are starting to take an interest in our work.

Just a quick post to let everyone know that we now have a Tribotix Wiki which we will be using for our User Manuals for HyKim (21DOF Robot Bear) & HyInt (powerful robotic processing system). All the information, such as schematics, source code, firmware and component datasheets for these two products/projects are available from this wiki.

Any questions or comments are most welcome.

Yes, we finally have added information about our Robot Bear, named Hykim, on our web site - sorry this took so long but we have so much going at the same time it's hard to get everything done quickly (I'm sure you'll understand). Anyway, the collage from our home page is shown below - be sure to have a look at ALL Hykim's features.


The processing system used in Hykim has been named HyInt, an acronym/abbreviation for Hykim's Intelligence. This will be sold as a stand alone processing system that can be used in any system where Dynamixels (AX, DX & RX) are used. The picture below shows a HyInt fitted to the University of Newcastle's (Australia) CycloidII - they have 2 of these which have been fitted with HyInt for research being done by post-graduate students.


Anyway, have a look at our website - there's lots of detailed information. User Manuals, in the form of Wiki's, are currently being finalised for both Hykim and HyInt.

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'.

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.