Another day, another 5,000 robot related items to post…

Welcome to the newbies!

Hehe, you guys probably know more about building robots than I do so it
is ‘newbies’ in the chronological sense of the word – If that sentence
even makes sense

The knowledge base is growing!

The knowledge base is growing nicely. I hope it will become a one stop shop for robot info with reviews and info on various resources around the net. As Kym’s recent adventrues have proven it is really easy to buy stuff from anywhere in the world but you want to pick the right one first time! Thanks for your help with that Kym.

Feel free to add entries to the knowledge base if you are registered. And register if you aren’t already

RoboRealm

Does your robot need vision? Would you like to experiment with vision based robotics without wasting time integrating or writing a vision processing library? Well then RoboRealm is for you! (it’s free as well

Hehe, I know it sounds like an advert but I randomly stumbled upon these guys a while ago. After playing around with some Python video capture code this weekend and deciding that I really needed to add some intelligence to my webcam I decided to finally fire it up and see what it could do.

Basically RoboRealm allows you to build up stacks of image filters to process static or video images in different ways. It’s really straightforward and in about 5 minutes I had a setup that could detect my face and track it around the room (for some reason I am highly visible in the red spectrum .

The power of RoboRealm comes from the fact that it can be extended via plugins or even connected to via a network to allow off-robot vision processing. Also it’s free which is nice

I’ll definitely post more of an in-depth review and maybe a tutorial as well once I have used it more.

Check it out here: http://www.roborealm.com/

The site also has heaps of interesting robot related info on it

Dean Kamen – at it again

The video below is from Dean Kamen’s presentation of his new prosthetic arm at TED. Amazing stuff, how long before we start getting our arms voluntarily amputated and replaced with these guys?