P3 and ASIMO – The Honda Humanoid Robots

Mutant Machines is a Television series shown on the Granada Men and Motors satellite channel. It is Scrapheap Challenge meets Combat Cars. Two teams of three people were given the task of creating a powerful, useful, motoring related machine from two or more donor machines. One challenge was to make a four wheel drive, four wheel steering car from two front wheel drive cars. The teams then had to run a race and a manoevreability contest. Another contest was to use a car to make a fast beer can crusher. Read more »

Mutant Machines is a Television series shown on the Granada Men and Motors satellite channel. It is Scrapheap Challenge meets Combat Cars. Two teams of three people were given the task of creating a powerful, useful, motoring related machine from two or more donor machines. One challenge was to make a four wheel drive, four wheel steering car from two front wheel drive cars. The teams then had to run a race and a manoevreability contest. Another contest was to use a car to make a fast beer can crusher. Read more »

The most difficult type of robot to design and build is a humanoid or android (unless you use very large feet). The Honda Motor Company in Japan started research on biped (two footed) walking in 1986 producing the famous prototypes P1, P2, P3 and now Asimo. The latest, July 2005, Asimo (so far only seen in Japan) can run, momentarily lifting both feet off the ground on each step. Honda are continuing their research and consider that in 15 to 20 years time they will have added sufficient intelligence to the robot to enable it to learn from its environment. Read more »

Robert Ringrose of MIT demo’ed a very cool design at AAAI97. His Hopper robot leg stands on its own, and, when activated, hops straight up and down, maintaining its balance. It corrects its balance if you shove it to one side. It can be adjusted to hop forward, backward left, right, etc., simply by changing its center of gravity. The hopper will move in the direction of its mass.This robot needs no brain. It is stabilized by physics. Hopping is a very stable motion. The rotary motion of the motor is turned into a sinusoidal motion which is in series with the spring.   Read more »

slap a hurking battery on the frame and your motors will do the rest. But your microcontroller (MCU) needs a much better power supply if you want decent performance. Here are some tips to keep your ‘bot and its brain happy. First, pick the right battery. For larger machines, where the battery is usually set deep inside the robot’s guts, choose a lead-acid gel-cell battery. They are cheap on the surplus market, take plenty of recharge cycles, and provide a fairly good power to weight ratio. Read more »

Chances are the problem lies with your power system. When motors start up, they require much more current than they use once they’re running. The battery will try its best to satisfy this bigger power requirement, but something has to give. In many cases, that “something” is the battery’s output voltage, which can sag so low that the robot’s MCU resets itself. Even worse, the MCU sometimes doesn’t reset cleanly, and “runs away,” executing garbage data from your EPROM. Read more »

For robot building enthusiasts, newcomers and grad students. This is one of a very few encyclopedic tell-all’s that every robot builder must have. MIT PhDs Jones and Flynn, who make their living designing and building commercially successful robots, have packed this book with tons of useful basics from wide-ranging topics. They’ve included useful resources to help you understand the design, construction and operation of the autonomous robots you’ll build with this book. Lots of tables, illustrations & color photos. Read more »

Soon we will have a robot guarding our house with all sorts of early warning and surveillance systems. MSecurit It is designed by the company MoviRobotics, a company located in Albacete in Science and Technology Park, University of Castilla la Mancha. MSecurit has motion sensors and thermal cameras. This is a half-clever and autonomous robot capable of human figures of different objects. The robot in question could go to an individual and to analyze their movements to assess whether it represents a danger or behaving in a suspicious manner and give alarms signals. You can also transmit the image of your surveillance camera can rotate 360 degrees and record and issue day and night. You can also send to the central image of the subject security and location coordinates detected.

This surveillance robot can also be diverted from the central security towards a specific objective to gather more data before acting.
The first prototype of this robot is designed for indoor places but its creators have already announced that in 2009 hope to construct another model adapted to open and measured outdoor spaces equipped with other devices such as gas detectors or chemicals. MSecurit weighs about 30 kilos and the company that created it: MoviRobotics expected to market soon with the goal of selling 100 units in the next two years.