Meet DARwln-OP!!!!!

DARwIn-OP (Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence - Open Platform) is an affordable, miniature-humanoid-robot platform with advance computational power, sophisticated sensors, high payload capacity, and dynamic motion ability to enable many exciting research, education, and outreach activities. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States, DARwIn-OP has been developed by RoMeLa at Virginia Tech with collaboration with University of Pennsylvania, Purdue University and Robotis Co., based on the award winning DARwIn series humanoid robots in development since 2004.

DARwIn-OP is a true open platform where users are encouraged to modify it in both hardware and software, and various software implementations are possible (C++, Python, LabVIEW, MATLAB, etc.) The open source hardware is not only user serviceable thanks to its modular design, but also can be fabricated by the user. Publically open CAD files for all of its parts, and instructions manuals for fabrication and assembly are available on-line for free.

A number of DARwIn-OP units will be fabricated and built by Robotis Co. for distribution to 11 partner universities (including major research universities, RUI institutions, a women's college, and two local high schools) and will utilize them in their classroom teaching and projects as well as outreach activities.

The objective of this annual workshop is to; introduce DARwIn-OP to the humanoid robotics community to broaden the DARwIn-OP project and form a user community; train the users for use in research, education, and outreach activities; disseminate results of the usage of DARwIn-OP in the classroom; and to obtain feedback from the users for future improvements.

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/

Hello!!!!

Hello Friends !!!
I know this is not a new blog that's on a platform of mobile robotics. On this blog i would like to share world of most advance MOBILE - ROBOTS. There are plenty of company behind the scene which are working on this platform.
As I am Student i would also like to update you with my research work on same platform. Here you would find news on robotics, links to tutorial, and updates of my work.
Stay tuned for more updates....