Meet The Bilibot!!!!

The Bilibot Project started at MIT through the exploration of what could be done with the new Kinect sensor. Besides being a great sensor for gesture technology, the Kinect is a powerful robotic sensor - so much so that robotics laboratories at universities across the world are replacing their $5000 sensors with the $150 Kinect! The Bilibot project takes advantage of this new technological breakthrough to provide a research quality robot at a hobby robot's price.

As personal robotics grows we need to both push the boundaries of technology and train future generations of researchers. Our mission is to create a robotics platform for exploration and create a community of robotics enthusiasts.

Bilibot, from the German word 'billig', or cheap, is a sophisticated robotics platform at an affordable price. A Bilibot consists of:
* a powerful computer
* an iRobot create
* a Kinect sensor
* mounting hardware to put it all together
* the ROS Robotic Operating system, with research contributions from roboticists all over the world!

Check out fot the offers of getting this fantastic robot with less price on the Bilibot website.....

Meet The Finch Robot !!!!

The Best Robot to get started from  Carnegie Mellon University.
The Finch is a new robot for computer science education. Its design is the result of a four year study at Carnegie Mellon's CREATE lab. The Finch is made to easily integrate into high school and college CS courses.

The Finch was designed to allow students to write richly interactive programs.
On-board features include:   
Light, temperature, and obstacle sensors    
Accelerometers   
Motors   
Buzzer    
Full-color beak LED   
Pen mount for drawing capability   
Plugs into USB port - no batteries required 
The Finch is currently programmable with Java and Python. Additional language support will be released throughout 2011.

The Finch has good online support & documentation to get started. Apart from this it is really cheap around 99$.

Meet Open Source E-Puck !!!

E-puck is another OPEN-SOURCE educational robot platform from EPFL Polytechnique for beigners.

The e-puck is a small (7 cm) differential wheeled mobile robot. It was originally designed for micro-engineering education byMichael Bonani and Francesco Mondada at the ASL laboratory of Prof. Roland Siegwart at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland). The e-puck is open hardware and its onboard software is open source, and is built and sold by several companies.

Technical Specifications

§  Diameter: 70 mm

§  Height: 50 mm

§  Weight: 200 g

§  Max speed: 13 cm/s

§  Autonomy: 2 hours moving

§  dsPIC 30 CPU @ 30 MHz (15 MIPS)

§  8 KB RAM

§  144 KB Flash

§  2 step motors

§  8 infrared proximity and light (TCRT1000)

§  color camera, 640x480

§  8 LEDs in ring + one body LED + one front LED

§  3D accelerometers

§  3 microphones

§  1 loudspeaker

It has good number of extension so that you never had to for anything outside the box.

§  A turret that simulates 1D omni-directional vision, to study optic flow,

§  Ground sensors, for instance to follow a line,

§  Color LED turret, for color-based communication,

§  ZigBee communication,

§  2D Omni-directional vision,

§  Magnetic wheels, for vertical climbing.

 Its flexibility has proven outstanding to many to research group. As it is an open platform many communities have developed their research on E-puck

You can find more details on http://www.e-puck.org/

Robot Operating System (ROS)

Standford University have came up with a classic operating system called ROS. It started in 2007 & now it has reached to the good level of maturity. It has great support of the various hardware platform. It works on Rovio & Neo too as described in  the only drawback is you should have linux distribution (e.g Fedora, Ubuntu etc..) to work on ROS.

As of 2008, development continues primarily at Willow Garage, a robotics research institute/incubator, with more than twenty institutions collaborating in a federated development model.

ROS provides standard operating system services such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. It is based on a grapharchitecture where processing takes place in nodes that may receive, post and multiplex sensor, control, state, planning, actuator and other messages. The library is geared toward a Unix-like system (Ubuntu Linux is listed as 'supported' while other variants such as Fedora and Mac OS X are considered 'experimental').

ROS has two basic "sides": The operating system side ros as described above and ros-pkg, a suite of user contributed packages (organized into sets called stacks) that implement functionality such as simultaneous localization and mapping, planning, perception, simulation etc.

ROS is released under the terms of the BSD license, and is open source software. It is free for commercial and research use. The ros-pkg contributed packages are licensed under a variety of open source licenses.

For more details check out Wikipedia page or visit ROS website.