Robots! In particular ones that currently exist. Behold the Cubli: it's a cube that can jump and walk using gyroscopes. It bothers me on a level I can't quite put into words, even though I understand perfectly how it works. It's just...somewhere inside me is this belief that rigid cubes shouldn't be able to do this. Also, a spherical robot: the MorphoHex (MKIII): It transforms from a sphere to a hexapodal robot. It only uses one hemisphere to walk when in hexapod mode, so maybe other stuff can be put into the top hemisphere (best suggestion so far is some sort of laser cannon). Anyway, nonfictional robots are super cool, because the constraints of having to exist push them in bizarre directions that most people don't naturally think about. So: favorite real robots?
I love the cubli. And yes, in part because i´m a portal nerd but also because platonic shaped object! that moves!
Cooperative robots! Problem: making intelligent yet adaptable things is hard. Solution: make a lot of dumb, limited things that can work together. So we end up with swarming robots: individual robots that are fairly limited in sensing, processing and movement capabilities, but the lot of them work together, passing local information. Note how terrible the route the robots use to get to where they're going. That's mostly because they can't go directly to where they will end up, because they don't know what's there or where anything that far away is, so they use each other to navigate. Stronger but somewhat less adaptable behavior can be done with self-assembling robot constructs: Look at it climb up that stair. Also, furniture! So much better than Ikea. Anyway, once nanotech really gets off the ground we're totally going to get a grey goo scenario and I am so looking forward to it.
Cubli makes me think of a video game glitch. Like, 'ha ha, look at that cube moving around and standing up on one corner, programs are silly' Also I am terrified of nanobots, partly because of the grey goo scenario
Something a little less sinister: Formerly the sole purview of street artists and children, here we have a robot capable of drawing chaotically on walls And I do mean chaotic. Check out that double pendulum. That's a classical example of a fully deterministic system that is completely unpredictable unless you have impossibly perfect measuring apparatuses.
It's that kind of stuff which makes me wonder what the point is that makes me love living on this beautiful planet
The mouse drives around and clicks the button at random as it wanders the internet, an experience I'm sure many of us are familiar with.
This is adorable: the flying robot previews terrain and plans paths for the walker. I mean, we've been doing this kind of thing for a long time with human spotters and laser guides and such, but now it's autonomous and robots.
This guy builds a BB-8 replica, and more importantly gives a long series of videos of the design and build process. Some of it is elegant, some of it is hacky, but all of it is interesting.
Saw this one floating around tumblr, accompanied by lots of jokes(?) about how teaching robots to disobey us will lead to the end of the world as we know it.
When I was in high school, one of the science olympiad events was to make a "sumo bot", basically a robot that could push or wrangle another robot out of a designated ring. Our team totally didn't have the time or resources to actually make one. So instead, we took a large rock and taped some pie tins, a calculator, and a bunch of wires to it. We took a pair of walkie-talkies, left one in the team room and pretended the other was a controller for the robot. The operator would speak commands into the walkie-talkie, and the person on the other end would reply "No" to everything. We got in 9th place! Out of 9 participants. Mostly we were surprised that we were allowed to qualify as participants at all.
