Currently about the size of a large TV set and made out of around 10k worth of scrap and a few selections from eBay, it's the start of a planned robot manufacturing plant.

Well, at least the prototype of one.

The pix are presently too screwed up to show, but I'll fix up a couple closeups of parts of the thing that actually work reasonably smoothly.

The Rube Goldberg device breaks down (OK, take this literally for the most part) into several Rube Goldberg sections, some of them only in planning now.

What's up and at least starting to run is the input hopper. Not exactly the simplest job you can imagine, the idea is to take any old random collection of parts and prepare them for further processing.

No, I'm not assuming parts come neatly aligned on prepared tapes — I like my negative entropy raw.

The rest of the machine presently does more screwing-up than assembling, but after a week or so of mucking around I can at least use it to dis-assemble my Bioloids. Which is why I'm ripping through all the pre-tested examples 2 or 3 a night.

Dis-assembly of a bot involves unscrewing everyhting not glued down and throwing same into the hopper. Various pathways classify the parts and try to ensure they end up in appropriate bins. To give you an idea of scale, most "bins" are around 125 cc.

The sorting isn't fast since it involves some "statistical methods" and feedback paths in the line.

I'm happyat present  if it can sort out 200 parts in under 45 mins with >= 90% accuracy.