In the past few months, we have covered plenty of awesome robots. You could always build your own if you know about electronics and 3D printing. The MT-20 is a functional 3D printed robot powered by an Arduino Uno board and 5 servos.
Meet Fleye: a flying, autonomous robot with a spherical design and fully shielded moving parts that allows you to hold, touch, and push it without any risk. It can be controlled from your iOS or Android device. It has selfie, panorama, hover, and manual modes.
Meet the SWATBOT from Howe and Howe: a robotic ballistic shield, door breacher, and vehicle remover designed for situations that may not be safe for humans. It allows the operator to manage a standoff in a safer fashion. As Howe & Howe explains:
EZ-Robot kits are quite a lot of fun to play with. These robots are easy to build and program. They already had smartphone support. As the below video shows, you can now control your EZ-Robot robots from your Apple Watch. The app can be customized, so you can add your own commands to the buttons.
Meet the AAR: an autonomous amphibious robot with a rocker-bogie design that uses two jet drives for water propulsion. The unit is currently going through tests and needs to be teleoperated, but it will be fully autonomous in the future. The below video shows this robot in action:
In the future, we are going to have shape changing gadgets. Take LineFORM for instance. It is a shape changing robotic interface that can be used as a smart wristband, touchpad, adaptive cord, smart ruler, workout tool, and everything in between. As you can see in the below video, this shape changing interface could have many exciting applications:
What do you think? Are you impressed?
[H/T: MIT]
Here is a cool robot arm that can pick and sort LEGO parts by size. The Mysterious Gear Sorter Robot can measure the number of teeth of the gears. You can build it using parts from a single LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 set 45544. The below video shows how this robot works:
Robots will be able to serve us food and drinks in the future. Many companies are already testing this idea. This video shows KUKA’s LBR iiwa serving up German beer to booth attendees at the China International Industry Fair 2015. As you can see in the below video, this robotic system can perform tasks safely:
[Source]
Robots are going to do many things for us in the future. They are already capable of dancing though. This video from the Japan Times shows Premaid AI performing smooth dance moves. It can perform pre-programmed dances to music. It comes with 25 servomotors.
So you want to build your own Transformers inspired robot? Smudger_WTH has put up a guide on Instructables that shows you how to do that. Spiderbot is a 3D printed robot with two modes of operation: spider and vehicle. It is Arduino-based and can be controlled using an Android phone. You are going to need:
The above video shows how this robot moves. More information is available on Instructables.
