DIY robots

HAVE you always wanted to build your own robots? Well, now you can take a crack at it. A professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University wants to start a do-it-yourself revolution by offering open source hardware that would allow people to create their own robots using standard parts that you buy from hardware stores. Here's an excerpt from the Scientific American story:

"[Robots] are really interesting to a diverse group of people," says Nourbakhsh, whose research has revealed that when kids are given programming tasks that involve robots, girls are no less interested than boys, and everyone is more likely to stick with the curriculum. "If there's a [software] bug," he adds, "the robot may veer off the desk and then I'll have to dive for it. That inspires people more than a bug on a computer screen that causes a red line to be off by two pixels. In collaboration with Rich Legrand, president of Austin-based robotics parts manufacturer Charmed Labs, Nourbakhsh wants to take DIY robotics to the next level, by offering the public an entire suite of tools to build their own droids from parts readily available at a hardware store—no soldering or programming required. The heart of Nourbakhsh's project, dubbed the Telepresence Robot Kit (TeRK), is the Qwerk, a box just over five inches square and an inch thick. Into this tiny, Linux-powered frame Legrand and his team of engineers have packed a 200 megahertz ARM processor—the same chip that runs Nokia N-Series Smartphones and the Nintendo DS—32 megabytes of SDRAM and eight megabytes of flash memory. It can connect to the outside world via WiFi, USB 2.0, 16 servo controllers and a host of other inputs and outputs.