Metronomes are oscillating objects, that each has pace on its own. They swing on itself. With a simple hack on the analogue world, you can some kind of "connect" this objects, that they "share" their parameters, in order to enter a global swing. The metronomes stand on a board that is resting on reels. A simple skateboard would work. The metronomes are synchronizing and desynchronizing again. Synchronizing and desynchronizing - entering a periodic oscillation on a higher level.
This video is amazing. It shows a self-written and self-build robot from Ranjit Bhatnagar (aka Moonmilk), that fetches speech to make music. The bot analyzes tone, rhythm and frequency of the speech and incredibly re-plays it... as music! The sound generation is done by self build instruments and I suppose, that the tone heights are more or less hardcoded into the system by a table or a scale or factor. The wire is bend according to tone-height. A nice chapter in artificial creativity and a proposal as well for the Artbots 2008 festival.
Some months ago I already was very enthusiastic by another video of Ranjit Bhatnagar. It was about a bot called Lev: a kind of theremin playing robot, that was playing a favourite tune.
A team of researchers have developed an artificial mouth that chews — for now — apple slices much like a human would. Complete with model teeth and artificial saliva.
This robot is part of the "Serious Lego" project from J.P. Brown and uses pneumatic mechanigs to get the robot in motion.
The Tower of Hanoi is not the most spectacular or exiting game, but maybe some kind of benchmark for playing robots. It needs not much sensory input for solving this problem, because can solve this problem with a simple list. It's a stupid mathematical task if you like to call it this way. This makes this simple for a "Hello World" playing robot. But also recursive problem-solving algorithms are around, according to this Hanoi-solving tutorial website.
"Race to the Bottom" is an very interesting experimental game. Interesting are the game mechanics: you control the game just by pressing any key. Your goal is to escape from the worm. By doing this you have to navigate you player, that is some kind of "bipad". You toggle the control points by pressing the key and have to surf the gravity to get into speed and action. It's easier than it sounds. Best, simply check it out.
It somehow reminded me on robotic locomotion. This game is locomotion training!
I don't want to get into this "Oh wow, is this a science fiction!"-thing, like many bloggers do on the web regarding this video. I was asking myself... What the hell are the robots doing? Not in self-reassembling mode, but before they get kicked. Is it some kind of love-dance? Or just some simple routines to keep the balance? Maybe kinetic robot-poetry?
A quick update for the technically interested. Arduino released a microcontroller, that is suited for "Smart Clothes": the LilyPad.
Still I don't know if I should like or dislike electronics directly attached to textiles. But to see it in action, you can check out one first project made my Rebecca Stern.
This weblog is dedicated to fresh and alternate views on robotics. It's the first robot-blog from Germany and maybe from Europe that writes regularly about robotics as the main topic. This blog is made by the same people around the Digital Tools Magazine. Updates practically daily, except sundays.
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Becky Stern - The only component on there that would get even slightly warm is that 5V regu...
Benoit Espinola - This could enter into the composition of Cloaca... :p
Eggshell Robotics - This games solves simply by steps in a logical order. Just think about it. It...
