If you’ve ever wanted your own self-driving car, this is your chance. [Sebastian Thrun], co-lecturer (along with the great [Peter Norvig]) of the Stanford AI class is opening up a new class that will teach everyone who enrolls how to program a self-driving car in seven weeks. The robotic car class is being taught alongside a [...]

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What’s better than one amazingly acrobatic quadcopter? How about a swarm of acrobatic micro-quadcopters? It’s not a rhetorical question, but an experimental reality. A team at the University of Pennsylvania are showing off their latest round of hovering robots which can move in formation and alter their orientation as a swarm. You may remember us [...]

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After the terrible tragedy in Fukushima, the cleanup and damage assessment has begun. A robot operator, known only as [S.H.] has decided to write a blog about their efforts.  As pictured above, they are using [iRobot] models, including the [510 Packbot], and the [710 Warrior]. Since cleanup efforts started, [S.H.] was posting on his or [...]

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Even though abstract expressionism died out several decades ago, robots are still chugging along dripping nihilistic pigment onto a cold, uncaring canvas. [Liat] and [Assaf] created a robot named The Originals Factory to create paintings in the style of abstract expressionism, a style of painting that is arguably best represented by [Jackson Pollock] and his ‘drip paintings.’ [...]

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[Pythagoras] is a delta robot built originally using RC servos. Humbly, [Aaron] “concedes” that the first version of his delta robot using hobby servos was easy to build. As anyone who has built any kind of robot knows though, there is definitely a lot of work involved in even the simplest robot. Coordinating three axes [...]

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Meet Boxie. He’s a robot videographer with levels of interaction we haven’t seen outside an episode of Dora the Explorer. The project was conceived by [Alex] as his MIT thesis project to see if robots can use humans to make themselves more useful. All we know is Boxie is freaking adorable, as evidenced by this video. The [...]

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This is Chippu, a robot that [Achu] has been working on for some time. His most recent addition was to give the robot the ability to respond to voice commands. This is accomplished using a variation of the open source Continuous Speech Recognition package called Julius. The package depends on two main parts, a set [...]

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[Mike Li] is showing of his stair climbing robot. It’s a bot that cruises around on a pair of tank treads, but some interesting modifications gave him the traction needed to ascend a flight of stairs without slipping backward. The image above shows this process in great detail. You can see the unaltered treads leaving [...]

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[Eric Gregori] recently spent some time messing around with a Hexbug Spider, and wrote in to share some modifications he made to the toy. In its unaltered form the robot can be controlled remotely, and while it’s fun to play with, the excitement is short lived. Using a TI MSP430 along with a small motor [...]

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The Chief Knock-a-Homer robot is [Psycho Freaky's] shout out to The Simpsons. The robot design appeared in an episode where [Homer] built [Bart] a fighting robot. Since he’s not robot builder, [Homer] actually climbed inside the shell and dished out sweet vengeance while suffering some severe injuries at the same time. But [Psycho] has the skills necessary to make this [...]

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[DJ Sures] has been pulling all-nighters lately to get his AR Drone Parrot build off the ground. Now that it’s up and flying around, he managed to get it to follow objects around the room using on board cameras. For the build, [DJ Sures] used the AR Drone ’flying video game’ quadrocopter. This toy has two on [...]

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After taking the Stanford Machine Learning class offered over the Internet last year, [David Singleton] thought he could build something really cool. We have to admit that he nailed it with his neural network controlled car. There’s not much to the build; it’s just an Android phone, an Arduino and a toy car. The machine [...]

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Want to monitor how much a wheel has turned in your project? Then you need a rotary encoder! Here’s a way to add rotary encoding without changing the mounting method of your wheels (translated). [Jorge] added it as a way to improve the functionality of this line-following robot. It uses a paper encoder wheel which is [...]

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[Marc Cryan] built this little bugger which he calls Wendell the Robot. But what good is an animatronic piece like this unless you do something fun with it? That’s why you can catch the movements matching [Michael Jackson's] choreography from the music video Thriller in the clip after the break. This is a ground-up build [...]

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Tweet Receiving, that is. This Ewok model, named “Ewen the Cheerlight,” is able to rotate its head left and right as well as show expressions. The most interesting feature of this hack, however, is that the little Ewok actually wakes up each time one tweets a “colour” to @cheerlights and lets it’s owner [Joel] know [...]

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Robots on four wheels are fun on their own merits, but one thing that most lack is the ability to see through walls.  With it’s onboard radar system, this bot is equipped to see objects that a person couldn’t normally detect on the other side of the wall. Although some of the more “nuts and [...]

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For a number of children born of geek parents, the WowWee Tribot is sure to make an appearance underneath a Christmas tree this year. By New Year’s, though, this toy will surely make its way to the back of a closet to sit unused until spring cleaning. It’s a shame to let such an interesting [...]

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[Achu Wilson] was watching TV when he saw an ad for Volkswagen’s latest Passat, which happens to come equipped with a park assist mode. This essentially allows the car to park itself with little to no user interaction. While these systems come as a pricey add-on option, he figured he could build something similar in [...]

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This is [James'] latest android build, a set of legs that use gyroscopes for balance. He started off by planning the build with some LEGO pieces to get an idea of how each foot and leg joint would fit together. This let him achieve one of his goals. From the start he wanted to create [...]

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Once again, we’re wowed over [Zenta]‘s robotic skill. A few months ago, [Zenta] posted a video of his MorpHex hexapod spherebot that left us awed. After a few long months, more bits of MorpHex have made it onto the chassis. [Zenta] says his project isn’t done but it’s still enough to knock our socks off. [...]

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[DJ Sures] just can’t help himself from tinkering with robot toys built in the 80s. This time, he got his hands on an Omnibot-2000 (not to be confused with his other Omnibot hack), and updated it for the 21st century. After its obligatory run through the dishwasher, the robot was fitted with two heavy duty [...]

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This tiny line-following robot is quite impressive. It’s [Ondrej Stanek's] second take on the design, which he calls PocketBot 2. Just like the earlier version, this robot is small enough to fit in a matchbox, but it’s received several upgrades in this iteration. The coin cells that ran the previous version have been replaced by [...]

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It’s off to the races once again with the Micomouse maze solving contest at the 2011 RoboGames. This is a picture of the winner, a bot called Min7 (main page) which was built by [Ng Beng Kiat]. Using four phototransistors and a flash sensor it managed to first map the contest maze, then speed run it [...]

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The guys over at Rusty Nail Workshop have put up an Internet controlled robotic arm for your amusement. While you’re waiting for the turkey to be done (or, you know, working), try your hand at moving some LEGO pieces around with a remote-controlled robotic arm. The build log goes through the parts needed for the [...]

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We’ve seen videos of people attaching chairs to gigantic welding robots and riding them around the shop, and while that would be fun for a little bit, the joy would be fleeting. Flight simulators built on a Stewart Platform are becoming old hat. Now there’s a new robot we want to ride. [Saul Griffith] from [...]

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[Eric Gregori] had an OWI535 toy robotic arm. Although cheap (coming it at around $30) the arm is only set up to be used via a wired control box. [Eric] knew he could do better by adding computer control via a TI Launchpad and motor driver peripheral. The arm has shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints, [...]

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This man is strapped onto the business end of a huge robotic arm. If you’ve seen videos of industrial robots on automobile assembly lines and the like, you know how fast and strong these machines are. But this isn’t headed for the factory floor, it’s a new flight simulator built do train Australian fighter pilots. Researchers at Deakin University [...]

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Here’s an art exhibit that does its own painting. The Senseless Drawing Bot (translated) uses the back and forth motion of the wheeled based to get a double-pendulum arm swinging. At the end of the out-of-control appendage, a can of spray paint is let loose. We’re kind of surprised by the results as they don’t [...]

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Basilisk? Nope, just your run-of-the-mill giant serpentine robot build. This build aims to recreate Titanoboa, a prehistoric snake which measured more than fifty feet long and weighted over a ton. They’re well on their way to completing the goal, as what you see above is fully operational, lacking only cosmetic niceties which would only serve to make the [...]

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That black box is hiding all kinds of goodies that make this rover a hacking playground. [Andrey] built the device around a BeagleBoard, which offers the processing power and modules that he needed to make the rest of it work. The control unit shrinks the pilot down to the rover’s size, using a cockpit that [...]

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