Brian Dorey is working on a DIY Pick and Place Machine that look like it is coming along very well. You can see the full build log of the machine on his site here. You can see some information here about the vision system that will be used. “The component selector is controlled via an Arduino Mini and this interfaces to a Smooth Stepper Ethernet board which is controlled
This Morphing Table Surface (PDF) by professor Hiroshi Ishii and his students, Sean Follmer, Daniel Leithinger, Alex Olwal and Akimitsu Hogge is one of the most intuitive morphing surfaces I have ever seen. Not only are your gestures duplicated on the interactive surface, there is also an image mapped onto the duplicated surface. Via: dailypicksandflicks.com “Past research on shape displays has primarily focused on rendering content and user interface
 If you are in Australia don’t look to the street for your package delivery, look to the sky! A company called Flirtey is developing a robust hexacopter drone that will be able to fly autonomously from warehouse to your current location in minutes carrying your purchases. To start they will be delivering books from Zookal, a textbook rental service. To use the service you would select the book
One common theme amongst 3D printers is that most of them print layer by layer. The printing is normally started on a flat build platform and grows from there. This is limiting though since with this limitation you would not be able to do things such as build a design around a curved platform or on an irregular surface. This 6 Axis prototype 3D printer changed that by giving
If you want to make your next robot be able to use hands like a human the Open Hand project would give you a head start in this direction. Building a cheap model of the complex human hand is no small task but if this campaign is successful I think we will be heading in the right direction. Via: Make “The Dextrus hand works much like a human hand.
The Pixy shows what is possible if you off load the complex task of video processing when it comes to vision processing. The kickstarter is already successful so we can already think of this as a product. I think this will change many of the portable projects that we see next year. Thanks to Rich LeGrand for the tip. Â “Pixy is a small camera about half the size of
 Camille and Genevieve Beatty who are 11 and 13 have built a great looking Mars Rover in their Garage. It guess it helps that their dad has a fully equipped robot building setup, but from looking at the build pictures I am thinking that the girls actually did most of the work. I am sure the dad helped along the way but that is how we learn right.
