In the past few months, we have covered plenty of awesome drone projects. Intel’s Drone 100 is quite special though. It is about using 100 dancing drones to put on a music and light show. These drones move and paint 3D shapes and messages in the sky. 4 pilots controlled 25 drones for this performance.
Remember the Dash robot? It is a cute, educational robot for kids that you can customize and program from your smartphone. Thanks to the Xylophone for Dash Robot, you can do more with it. This accessory turns your Dash into a Xylophone player. You will be able to compose your own songs or use existing songs.
Here is a robot that gives you a third arm. Developed by Georgia Institute of Technology researchers, this robotic arm allows musicians to play with three arms. The two-foot long smart arm can be attached to a musician’s shoulder and respond to gestures or the music it hears. It also adapts to its environment.
Meet the LG Rolling Bot: a cute robot ball that lets you keep an eye on your pet and monitor your home via WiFi. It can capture photos or video of your pets while you are away. The Rolling Bot can be controlled from your smartphone. It is expected to work with other smart LG appliances.
Robots are already being used in manufacturing environments to make businesses more operationally efficient. As the below video shows, robots are being used to build Model X units, which happens to be an awesome all-wheel drive vehicle with a 257 miles of range and zero to 60 miles of 3.2 seconds.
Here is a typewriter that can automatically type what you dictate to it. As Zip Zaps explains on YouTube, this typewriter was built using a Smith Corona typewriter, Arduino, and a Pololu servo controller. The code for the project is written in C#.
Robots are going to do many things for us in the future, including ironing our shirts and pants. In a paper accepted to ICRA2016, a group of Columbia University researchers describe a robotic system for ironing clothing items. The robot uses Kinect sensors for wrinkle detection.
We have covered plenty of cool quadcopters here in the past. Have you ever wondered how fast they can ascend to 100 meters? Dirk Brunner has built a quadcopter that can complete the task in 3.871 seconds. As it turns out, this is a world record:
[H/T: Guinness World Records]
In the future, drones will be able to complete missions with minimal human intervention. The DRONEBOX is a drone nesting solution with a grid-independent battery charging system that lets you use drones in remote areas. It can be installed anywhere for your drone to perform scheduled routines or deploy on demand.
Soft robots and wearables are the future. We have already seen many interesting soft robot concepts in the past. This video from the Interactive Architecture Lab covers the Soft Architecture Machines Workshop led by Dr. Helge Wurdemann, Prof. Kaspar Althoefer, Julie Freeman, Vincent Hygh, and Ruairi Glyn.
