Kondo's spring-loaded spider robot creeps on the cheap (video) U of Arizona’s Cheetah Robot Taking Shape. There’s a new Cheetah robot in town, or at least half of one (not to be confused with this other project from MIT, the Cheebot from CMU, or this one by Boston Dynamics) thanks to Tony Lewis and undergraduate student Matt Bunting at the University of Arizona’s Robotics & Neural Systems Lab.
Matt made a name for himself when he built a hexapod robot that got picked up by Intel. The research team presented their work on the Cheetah Robot’s hind limbs at ICRA 2011, but sadly the video described in the paper hasn’t popped up just yet (the leg is said to be shown kicking out from a crouched position with tremendous speed and force). The legs make use of a hybrid actuator concept where electric motors (RX-64s) are used for fine positioning combined with bursts of energy provided by pneumatic actuators. The legs’ plastic shells were designed in Solidworks and printed on the lab’s 3D printer. Looks pretty cool so far, doesn’t it?
[source: IntelFreePress @ Flickr] Cheetah.pdf (application/pdf Object) UA Engineering Robotics Whizz Named Student of the Year. By Pete Brown - May 6, 2011, 2:12 pm Electrical and computer engineering graduate Matt Bunting was named student of the year at the Annual Creativity in Electronics awards for his design of a six-legged robot.
The ACE awards were held May 4 in Palo Alto, Calif., and organized by Electronic Engineering Times, a leading industry publication with more than 500,000 subscribers worldwide. Bunting's hexapod robot has been wowing robotics fans and the electronics industry since he built it as a class project in 2009 while still an undergraduate in electrical and computer engineering. Bunting graduated in 2010, and is still in electrical and computer engineering on a direct-to-PhD program with a robotics focus. "I'm interested in robot locomotion that emulates biological movement," Bunting said. Darpa’s Cheetah-Bot Designed to Chase Human Prey.
Perhaps you thought the four-legged BigDog robot wasn’t eerily lifelike enough.
That’ll change soon. Student Builds Spider Robot From Spare Parts - FoxNews.com. TUCSON, Ariz. -- Picture a spider-like robot that teaches itself to walk, can adapt when damaged and watches its maker as he moves around the room.
That might sound terrifying. Add artificial intelligence into the mix and you have all the makings of a science-fiction horror film. Botropolis.com. A collaboration of Nanyang Polytechnic of Singapore, Schmid Engineering AG, and Analog Devices Inc, has created a small, hexapodal robotic spider. The robot can navigate around obstacles, is capable of fitting into tight spaces, and it can limbo and dance. The six legs of the bot move independently, and are ideal for moving the hexapod across unfriendly terrain.
Walking and rotating are two movements of the bot based around six-legged insect locomotion. The legs each move in simple three-dimensional trajectories (circular, rectangular), and mathematical models for the movements are calculated during the run. Power, vision, sensors, actuators, and communication for the bot were provided by Schmid Engineering. Intel taps student's robot for processor demo. While I've always been a little scared of spiders, watching student Matt Bunting's hexapod robot dancing has all but cured me.
Maybe it's the combination of the folk guitar and little leg sways in the below video, but all of a sudden, spiders (at least the robotic kind) look so damn cute. Cuteness aside, the hexapod bot has gotten some attention from high places. Two days after Bunting, a University of Arizona electrical-engineering senior, posted a YouTube video of his bot, Intel ordered two of them to promote its Atom processors at trade shows and engineering meetings. The robot uses Intel's 1.60GHz Atom Z530 and US15W chipset. It runs on the Ubuntu open-source operating system.
The Story of Matt Bunting and the Hexapod that Intel Bought - GoRobotics. Matt Bunting’s story should be inspiring to anyone out there who builds robots.
You see, Matt was just your average robot builder (well, maybe above average), until Intel (yes, that Intel) spotted one of his creations and decided they wanted to use it as a showcase item for their latest push into embedded Atom processors. Embedded Design Center. Self Portrait (hexapod) on Twitter. New Issue. Private PaaS for the Agile Enterprise If you already use virtualized infrastructure, you are well on your way to leveraging the power of the cloud. Virtualization offers the promise of limitless resources, but how do you manage that scalability when your DevOps team doesn’t scale?
In today’s hypercompetitive markets, fast results can make a difference between leading the pack vs. obsolescence. Organizations need more benefits from cloud computing than just raw resources. They need agility, flexibility, convenience, ROI, and control. An international open competition in the Robocup Soccer - Standard Platform League, among universities from all over the world. UA RNSL Intel Hexapod: 3D Balance Gestures. Embedded Design Center - Reference Design: Hexapod Robot. Search Results. Student Builds Spider Robot From Spare Parts (w/ Video) Picture a spider-like robot that teaches itself to walk, can adapt when damaged and watches its maker as he moves around the room.
That might sound terrifying. Add artificial intelligence into the mix and you have all the makings of a science-fiction horror film. Luckily, the UA electrical engineering senior and creator of the hexapod, Matt Bunting, said he plans to teach the robot only basic emotions. "I've definitely thought about adding (artificial emotion), but the emotions would be very simplistic -- happy, sad, bored -- just very simple emotions.
You can only do so much," he said. Needless to say, Bunting's project for his spring 2009 cognitive-robotics class is drawing a lot of attention from the robotics world. Matt Bunting's Hexapod Robot Hits the Road.