The guys at Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab have a started a wiki about building modular robots.
The site is at: http://www.molecubes.org/
If they look familiar, and older version of the robots were used for their experiments on robotic self-replication.
They also have new interesting papers in the site like: Curius and Creative Machines and Printing Food.
October 12, 2007 at 3:48 pm
I was going to contest the “Cheap” portion of the title, then I saw that this is a servo motor!
That’s not too bad, considering it keeps track of its position as it moves around. Interesting self-replicating experiment too. I’m still wondering what the scale of “cheap” to “expensive” is for robotics developers. Surely, it depends on sponsorship.
Private experimenters (like me), and most mid-to-small size University groups would have the lightest budgets. Mid-to-large size Universities and Corporations would have more robust budgets. At least, that’s what I’m thinking.
I’ll have to give some thought to how I’d use them. Those very fine jumpers exposed on the connecting sides look quite fragile. I wonder how tough these bits are?
Thanks for the link -
October 13, 2007 at 11:50 am
Actually I thought you could make the parts using one of the rapid prototyping machines you can build on your own (using the instructions found at: http://www.fabathome.org from the same lab in the article) but the tolerances are too tight. So it’s not that cheap. The total price is $229 based on the incomplete shopping list they have.