Tape Measure Pyramid Bot

This looks cool – though I’m not entirely convinced that tape-measures are the future of building materials.

I quite like these triangular robots… basically because the pancake-picker variants are insanely fast, and because I think they’ve eventually supplant cartesian XYZ axis CNC machines. The tape-measure-bot is interesting because it can change shape and move about… but ideally if it’s going to be making things it needs to be on a ceiling, working downwards.

In other random robot videos…

The ultimate in Nerdware… glasses that control a quadracopter. This is a step along the way… and although it’s not the most massively impressive video in the world, it’s quite an important step, and it’s really cool that it’s a hacker-kid doing it.

And beyond that… a grapefruit segmentation bot

And not so DIY… another medical bot

I think we’re going to see a Cambrian Explosion of moving-machines… and it’s going to happen when we get a sensor-motor feedback-loop sorted out – so a robot isn’t blindly moving a limb based on memory (of where the limb was at the start of the move) but on actually being able to see the limb in relation to reference points in its environment.

You know… like you do.

Ever try to play with one of those glow-in-the-dark frisbies? It’s actually quite tricky – because you can’t see your hands.

So there’s your project for the weekend. Make a sensor-motor feedback loop.