Technabob » stanford

Stanford Engineers Create JediBot, Slowest Jedi Ever

Shane McGlaun — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 17:27:44 +0000

Some engineering students at Stanford get to take a class that might be the coolest class ever called Experimental Robotics. Being the geeks they are, some of the students opted to build a robot arm that could have a lightsaber fight with you using foam lightsabers. The bot was dubbed JediBot.

The robot makes an attack (slowly), and when the person fighting counters the attack it stops and resets for another attack. The JediBot doesn’t move nearly as fast as those Yaskawa Industrial bots that we saw fight each other with lightsabers before. This time though at least you can get in on the dueling action. You can check out the video to see just how slow the JediBot is.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Other students in the class created a burger-cooking bot and a robot that can play golf, but the JediBot is certainly the coolest of them all.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[via IEEE Spectrum]

Frankencamera: Open Source Digital Camera

Lambert Varias — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:23:40 +0000

Stanford computer science and electrical engineering professor Marc Levoy is a bit tired of the marketing gimmicks for digital cameras. He says that the “megapixel war” is over and the battle has now shifted from quantity to quality, as in what feature does camera X have that camera Y doesn’t. But Levoy doesn’t want to wait for the competition to heat up before companies start dishing out neat features for people to enjoy. He wants everyone to be able to customize and improve their cameras, without waiting for companies to innovate, and without restrictions like warranties. Levoy and his team think that the Frankencamera can make that dream come true.

Stanford University News runs down the hardware of the open source camera: “…the motherboard, per se, is a Texas Instruments ‘system on a chip’ running Linux with image and general processors and a small LCD screen. The imaging chip is taken from a Nokia N95 cell phone, and the lenses are off-the-shelf Canon lenses, but they are combined with actuators to give the camera its fine-tuned software control. The body is custom made at Stanford.”

Computer science graduate student Andrew Adams – pictured above with Levoy – wants digital camera users to be able to download applications for their cameras, in the same way that we download programs that extend or improve our PCs. Levoy’s team hopes to have the Frankencamera’s operating system released publicly by next year for some crowd-sourcing action.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[via PhysOrg]

Mesicopters: Tiny Flying Robots to Take Over the World (Someday)

Technabob — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:49:25 +0000

Stanford researchers have designed these incredible little robots are about the size of a quarter for use in atmospheric research on Earth (and one day) on Mars. I just want them for conducting research in my office building.

[via Brendan's Official Blog via Neatorama]