Meet RoboSoccer: a tabletop soccer game with robot players that lets you compete with up to 6 players. It has a foldable pitch and interactive goals. You can control these robot players from your smartphone. The robots are pocket-sized and don’t take a whole lot of space. They last up to 4 hours on battery.
Meet Steve: a robot designed with filmmakers in mind. It is small enough to fit in the back of your car and can carry up to 20kg of weight. It has mecanum wheels to move in all directions. Steve comes with a safety cage for your camera. It is driven by Arduino.
The Raspberry Pi is a wonderful platform for learning coding and electronics. The Pi Cruiser is a neat little kit that lets you build your own rugged mobile robot with this platform. It can be coded in Python & Scratch.
We have seen a bunch of cool Rubik’s Cube solving robots in the past. If you are into 3D printing, you can always build your own. The 3D-printed Raspberry Pi-powered Rubik’s Cube solving robot by otvinta3d stands 35cm tall. It takes about 70 hours of print time to complete it.
Meet Lockheed Martin’s ONYX: a lower-body exoskeleton that can reduce fatigue and increase mobility of its users. By reducing the effort in walking and climbing, this wearable device helps soldiers do more. ONYX conforms to the human body. It has sensors to report “speed, direction, and angle of movement to an on-board computer that drives electro-mechanical actuators at the knees.”
Meet the KRAKEN: a robotic arm designed for the space industry that can manipulate controls and items in small spacecraft. It has 7 degrees of freedom and measures 1m. It requires only 19cm x 27cm x 36cm space. This robotic arm has a hot-swappable end-effector interface.
Robot blocks are nothing new. We have covered a bunch of them in the past. MIT researchers have come up with self-transforming robot blocks that can jump, spin, flip, and identify each other. They can self-assemble to form different structures but can move completely on their own.
Meet Little HERMES: a bipedal robot from MIT engineers that can learn from side to side, walk in place, and jump while keeping its balance. It is about a third the size of a human adult with a torso and two legs.
There are plenty of programmable robots on the market but many of them are simply glorified toys. Misty II is designed for serious developers. It comes with facial recognition, 6 capacitive touch sensors on its head and chin, bump sensors, IR-based time-of-flight sensors, and 4″ LCD display/screen.
