Fish are popular animals to keep as pets, and for good reason. They’re relatively low maintenance, relaxing to watch, and have a high aesthetic appeal. But for all their upsides, they aren’t quite as companionable as a dog or a cat. Although some fish can do limited walking or flying, these aren’t generally kept as […]
While it is fun to get toys that look like your favorite science fiction props, it is less fun when the electronics in them don’t measure up to the physical design. [Steve Gibbs] took a Hasbro R2D2 toy robot and decided to give it a brain upgrade along with enhanced sensors. You can see a […]
If you wanted to build a robot that chased light, you might start thinking about Raspberry Pis, cameras, and off-the-shelf computer vision systems. However, it needn’t be so complex. [Ed] of [Death and the Penguin] demonstrates this ably with a simple robot that finds the light the old-fashioned way. The build is not dissimilar from […]
Decades ago, shows like Star Trek, The Jetsons, and Lost in Space promised us a future full of helpful computers and robot assistants. Unfortunately, we haven’t quite gotten our general-purpose helper to do all of our tasks with a simple voice command yet. But if some sweat equity is applied, we can get machines to do specific tasks […]
Robots don’t have to be large and imposing to be impressive. As this tiny quadruped from [Dorian Todd] demonstrates, some simple electronics and a few servos can create something altogether charming on their own. This little fellow is named Sesame. A quadruped robot, it’s built out of 3D-printed components. Each leg features a pair of […]
If you ever built a line following robot, you’ll be nostalgic about [Jeremy’s] light-seeking robot. It is a very simple build since there is no CPU and, therefore, also no software. The trick, of course, is a pair of photo-sensitive resistors. A pair of motors turns the robot until one of the sensors detects light, […]
[Engineezy] might have been watching a 3D printer move when inspiration struck: Why not build a robot arm to clean up his workbench? Why not, indeed? Well, all you need is a 17-foot-long X-axis and a gripper mechanism that can pick up any strange thing that happens to be on the bench. Like any good […]
[Aditya Sripada] and [Abhishek Warrier]’s TARS3D robot came from asking what it would take to make a robot with the capabilities of TARS, the robotic character from Interstellar. We couldn’t find a repository of CAD files or code but the research paper for TARS3D explains the principles, which should be enough to inspire a motivated […]
If you’re really good, it’s possible to solve a Rubik’s Cube in under 10 seconds. For the rest of us, though, it can be an exceedingly tedious task. For that reason, you might like a Rubik’s Cube that can solve itself, like the one [zeroshot] is trying to build. What [zeroshot] built is essentially a […]