Making The Most Of Robot Kits

A robot is loosely defined as a mechanical device designed to do the work of a person

. More specifically, robots and robot kits are there to help us build machines that seem to learn and think, mobile machines that have something living about them.

You may have seen on the news recently that a Japanese company created the worlds first Limbo dancing robot. It looked like a green rubber X and it flick flacked its way into the history books by Limboing under a pole.

It"s actually pretty easy to build machines capable of learning from their environment. It"s all about using sensors, which some might say are the single electronic component that set robot kits apart from your run of the mill hobby project.

Of course there are as many sensor components in modern hobby electronics as there are things to sense light sensors, sound sensors, edge sensors, even moisture sensors and heat sensors. So the trick to making a machine that does things like a living being lies in finding the correct sensors for the behaviour you want to mimic.

A robot hand, for instance, can be made to avoid heat sources just like a human hand "simply by embedding heat sensors in its fingers and palm. When the heat sensor registers a temperature above a preset low, you program the hand to jerk away. Presto a human hand!

You could make your hand more complex, by programming it to pick things up as well provided, of course, they arent hot. This can be done by including pressure sensors in the fingers. When the pressure sensor reads above a certain level, you program the hand to close and lift whatever it has found off the table.

Robot kits, which are available either as individual behaviour kits or as do it yourself robot builds, let you explore the relationship between sensors, programming and mechanised behaviour. A simple kit will allow you to build a pre-programmed bot with a specific behaviour, for example avoiding the edge of a table. While a more involved kit allows you to build a machine with one or two starter behaviours and then you use add-ons to develop its behaviour, making it more and more eal with every new addition.

There is something endlessly fascinating about robot kits. Ever since Isaac Asimov first invented the idea, with his stories about mechanisedmenwhose origin was more golem than human, the modern world has had an entwined relationship with the idea that you could build a machine and it would be indistinguishable from a person.

The goal of serious robotics is to do just that and there are already machines out there with startling behavioural properties. For instance, there already a neural interface that lets a human wearer operate a mechanical hand in a completely different country and feel the things it feelsthrough the feedback. Though it is strange but it is true. So the question is what next? And how long will it take us to get there, wherever there is?

by: Ewan Fisher

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