Adhesive foil/cover for Lego Mindstorms NXT available

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Ever wanted to individualize your NXT a bit more?

Now you can buy the Roberta adhesive foils for Lego Mindstorms NXT (design by Ashley A. Green) at Technik LPE and coulourise your NXT the way you want. The foils are wipeable, heavy-duty and removable.

See:
http://roberta-home.de/de/aktuelles/|neu|-roberta-nxt-klebefolie

http://www.shop.lego-in-der-schule.de/Uebersicht?sparte=10

Interesting designs for Rescue Robots – Part 1

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Robot rescue is one, if not even the one, upcoming field for robotics. It is not new, but at present many teams and projects around the world are showing up with new ideas and solutions (e.g. NIFTi, CRASAR). So I will start to collect a few interesting approaches, and present them here on RoboBlog.

So our first candidate is the „Bari-bari II“ robot. It is developed by the Tokyo institute of technology and designed to help rescue workers by lifting heavy boulders / plates.

The capabilities are shown in the following video:

The interesting point is not that the robot can lift heavy material. That can be performed by many robots. The most robot systems that can lift material make usage of either a physical manipulator (hand or arm like) or of a blade (like we have presented earlier on this Blog: RoboPlow). But as fare as i know there is not a single one that is designed i such a way that the hole system itself if part of the lifting unit.

By side of all enthusiasm, some questions are still open:

  • The „Bari-bari II“ is presented as a tool to crawl under a plat or similar stuff. To do so it makes some maneuvers of lifting and singe off. What is about preventing against more collapses?
  • If there is now a victim below the plate, he or she will also fell the pressure of the lifting and singing. But as fare as i know, this is not wise. Victims, which are stuck should only be moved as much as needed and you shout never remove the pressure from him or here if you can not eminently support him/here by medicine. During the suck time the blood can often not circulate freely. This causes clumps of blood component. If the pressure is released the blood starts to circulate freely trow the whole body and the clumps can jam haemals. This can causes thrombosis which can lead up to death.

Empfehlenswertes Aibo Forum

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Für alle deutschsprachigen Aibo Besitzer, die auch unter dem Problem fehlender Ersatzteile, mangelnder Informationen oder schlappen Akkus leiden hier ein Tipp:

http://www.aibo-freunde.de

Hier steht man euch mit Rat und Tat zur Seite, hilft bei kleineren Problemen und diskutiert auch über „non-Aibo“ Themen.

FAIR Libary is online

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As we have already reported is the „Fraunhofer Autonomous Intelligent Robotics Devices“ Library now open source and available at the sourceforge project „OpenVolksBot„. In addition we can know report some more details on it.

  • The FAIRlib is now organized as several Eclipse-Project (fairAlgorithm, fairCore, fairDevices, fairGraphics, fairTestAlgorithm, fairTestCore, fairTestDevices and fairTestGraphics). This allows an easy extending and compiling the projects and minimizes the cross dependencies.
  • The dependences  are listed in the ReadMe and can be auto installed by using the script „apt-get-fair“
  • A way of easy installing is given by the script „install-fair„
  • The current version is tested on the Ubuntu 9.10 (64-Bit) ,  but will also work on other OS (by side of auto solving the dependences)
  • Fair is published under the CC-by-sa-nc License .

So now we all can reuse and cooperated in a create library, instead of reinventing the „wheel“ again and again. 😉

The RepRap Project – An open source 3D-printer for less then 500€

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Everybody who has ever designed and built a robot by him self knows about the difficulty by building special components like sensor holders, adapters or axes bearings . Either you have to pay a huge amount of money to a company that is willing to build small product series on it or , which is more common you build them by your self and spend a lot of time on prototyping and manufacturing tasks, and then build it by hand. For the last option the  usage of a 3D-printers can speedup the process.

Generally spoken is a 3D-Printer an industrial robot with several degree of freedoms, that is moving an extruder and injects either plastic or metal in a way that a plastic or metal object (the prototypes)  are created. This technology allows therefore to print physical objects. By using this technology, the coast of one object/prototype are dramatically shrinking. More or leas the coast of one object is given by the material coasts and the time which is needed to build a CAD-Design of the object.

The major drawback of 3D-Print is the acquisition costs. Professional printer can easily coast more then 20.000€. But there is hope. The open source project RepRap allows us to build our own 3D-Printer by coast round about 500€. RepRap stands for Replicating Rapid-prototyper and is a hardware open source project. Like the big industrial machines does this project support a easy way do build your first prototypes.

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

Mendel’s improvements over Darwin from Rep Rap on Vimeo.
Of course there is also darkness. The RepRap-hardware is currently on the state of the industrial machines from 5 years ago. For example does the open source version not support to printing two type of material simultaneously. But this is extremely usefully if you have to build object with huge holes, which would collapse if there is no filling material inside that will be removed later.

But still this technollogy makes prototyping that easy and quick that it is worth to give it a try.

Updated:

The „Elektrischer-Reporter“ (German) has a reportage of the background and the ideas for the close future on 3D-Printing and homemade products. The basic stadement is an upcoming change of production lines. Every customers will be also a small factory and an upcoming market of „digital construction plans“ will showup.

Open source is FAIR – IAIS released the „Fraunhofer Autonomous Intelligent Robotics Devices Library“ as open source

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Developing and programming robotic systems can sometimes be an unsatisfying task. This feeling is mostly not related to problems that occur during „high level“ problem solving. It is mostly appearing if you try to get the system it self up and running. So tools and solutions are needed to help us to overcome these initialization barriers.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems or for short Fraunhofer IAIS, does now offer a special computer library that can support the developer to get a width field of sensors and actors up and running. In addition it includes a various number of algorithmic for every day robotic problems like Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) or image processing. The so called „Fraunhofer Autonomous Intelligent Robotics Devices Library“ or for short FAIR library, is a C/C++ development library which is actively used in the VolksBot® projects and is released as open source project under the GNU-license Creative Commons.

FAIRlib is soon available at the sourceforge project „OpenVolksBot„.

Updated: The initail version is now available (see also here) and is published under the CC-by-sa-nc.