25 Things To Do With Your ER1

via meerkat via robots.net, ER1, “.. the first-ever personal robot system that can be trained to do useful and fun things around your home or office. The ER1 features a flexible design with all the hardware you need to create the ultimate robot.”

From Rodney Brooks, head AI guy @ MIT, Roomba Intelligent FloorVac, out of his company, IRobot.

LEGO Ultimate Collector Star Destroyer [from slashdot] Anyone else notice that starwars.com sets a cookie called “Wookie-Cookie”? 🙂

Installed my Vision Command camera tonight, although the Lego software works w/ only Windows 98. I had to install the Logitech software, which means I can’t use the Lego specific aspects of Vision Command. To my rescue comes Lejos, which has a Java version that implements many of the Lego features.

Went to the MIT Museum today. My favorite parts included the work of Harold Edgerton (who has a program at MIT named after him), the Holograms, and all the robots (Kismet, Boadicea, Cog and UniRoo).

By far the most interesting robot I saw was the RoboTuna, which looks eerily fishlike (no gills). The tuna (the real one) is known to be able to travel long distances, which led scientists to believe that tuna must use their energy efficiently, which led some crazy geeks to try and replicate the tuna’s efficiences in a robot. I wish they have the video of RoboTuna online, it was amazing to watch.

Some other interesting projects at MIT that I didn’t see at the Museum:

Troody (video!!!)

Towing Tank

Robot Pike (video!!!)

W3C: Who knew that the W3C is an MIT Research Center?

Mom got me the Lego MINDSTORM Robotics Invention Set for my birthday… made my first bot today, the RoverBot. Light and Touch Sensors, speed control, direction… all with an easy to use visual code editor (really visual: you drag and drop “blocks” of code onto your template, save, download via IR to the bot and run the program). My favorite ‘sample’ program so far is a bot named Refrigerator Fred that lowers his ‘sunglasses’ when he sees bright light. Useless, but fun.