subject: Having Fun And Learning Using Robot Kits From School Projects To Home Use [print this page] Robot kits let you set your real mad professor free creating machines that perform specific actions in the manner of a person or an animal. They?e frequently used in school to teach children about maths and electronics for example, the drawing bug, which I remember from my own school years, that can be programmed on a computer to draw a picture on a big piece of paper on the floor.
The level and complexity of modern robot kits can be anything from exceedingly simple to extremely complicated. You can even design and build your own robots using base line kits bristling with add ons.
Most of these add ons are for behavioural traits. So you begin by building a robot kit that can (for example) sense edges and stay away from them. Then perhaps you add a sensor kit that also enable the bot to sense things above and behind it. With enough imagination and the right combination of robot kits and add ons, you can create a mechanical ?eingcapable of navigating for itself and even following simple instructions.
Conceptually, these robot design kits are first cousins to the robotics work being done by major companies today for example by Honda, whose robots can perform some incredibly human actions. Modern robotics is entering an extraordinarily exciting field now, in which robot hands (for example) can be powered by direct brain impulsesfor a human user in another country. The same sort of behaviour, though clearly on a much smaller scale, can be promoted in amateur robots using the right robot kits and a bit of ingenuity.
For instance, using a sensor glove similar to the kind sold for use with some modern gaming stations, it is theoretically possible to build a robot that is powered by the user using motions of his or her hand. So you could, then, build a robot hand that mimicked your exact hand movements enabling you to pick up objects inside tanks or in other locations where you cannot go yourself.
This kind of functionality is already expressed in the world of marine biology, where submersible robots have claws operated in a similar manner. The surface-bound controller looks at the world under the ocean through a camera lens and makes his or her drone pick stuff up from shipwrecks, r bring back scientific samples for further study.
Of course most of these applications are a little way beyond the scope of your average amateur robot kit. But like every in the world of science and engineering, really all you need to make those great leaps are the first ideas, the first prototypes and a clear vision of how your current robotics design could be modified to do something truly special.
Big or small, robot kits are a direct relation to some of the most exciting and potentially valuable work that is being done in electronics today. So next time you build a little pl
