Meet the AgBot II: an agricultural robot designed to play a role in the day-to-day operation of farms. This particular robot features autonomous navigation, so it can construct a path with the defined perimeter and covers the area for weed control and crop nutrient management.
WowWee’s robotic toys are a lot of fun. CHIP, their latest robot, is a robotic pet with blue-green LED eyes. The robot sits with the tap of a button and detects your presence via Bluetooth. It comes with a wristband that allows it to pick up your location.
We have covered plenty of cool educational robot kits in the past. The HackerHAND is a robotic hand that you can program to learn more about coding and technology. The software uses simple programming blocks, but C, Python, Java, and other programming languages are supported.
Wearable devices are getting more advanced all the time. In the future, you will be able to control your smart gadgets using your mind. That future is not too far out. Take the Touch wearable for instance. It is a smart device that reads brainwaves from 8 regions of your brain and translates them into commands, allowing you to control drones and other smart gadgets.
The HACKberry is a pretty exciting project that involves developing open source 3D-printed bionic hands. The goal is to develop an artificial arm that developers and artificial arm users can build and customize as they wish. We have seen various updates on this project in the past few months. The latest video shows a HACKberry thumb MP joint test.
Pretty exciting, isn’t it? You can find out more information here.
Drones are going to do many things for us in the future. They could even help us prevent wildfires. The Unmanned Aerial System for Fire Fighting, which is under development by a team of UNL experts, can ignite and monitor fires in remote areas. It can operate in harsh environments with limited supervision.
The drone enables people to perform fire management tasks with higher efficiency. It can also aid in conservation efforts. More information about this project is available on UNL’s website.
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Meet the PMB-2: an autonomous mobile base for robotic projects. It is fully compatible with ROS and customizable. This mobile base is navigation ready. You can add your own sensors to do more with it. The PMB-2 has a max payload of 50kg and 1 m/s max velocity. It measures 0.54m x 0.54m x 0.3m.
We have covered a bunch of robotic roaches such as the VelociRoACH here in the past. BiomimeticMillisys has shared a video that shows this robot getting a force sensing shell. The researchers created a lightweight force-torque sensor “using photo-interrupters with force sensitivity of 17 mN.” The sensor can be used to gather body contact location data.
Robots are fun to play around with. It makes sense to use them to teach kids how to code. Wink is an educational kit based on Arduino that helps students transition from graphical programming to written code languages. Students can program their robot to follow lines, seek light, detect barrier, or roam autonomously.
Many of us have seen and used the Leap Motion controller. You can develop apps and do all kinds of fun things with a Leap. This video from Interactive Architecture Lab shows how you can use this technology to control an industrial robot:
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