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Wednesday April 25, 2007
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Under the umbrellas of wacky names like "Qwerk" and "TeRK," researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are rolling out what may be the first ever Robot recipes. No, you don't throw a bunch of components in a pot , add salt and cook on high for two millennia. Instead, TeRK (the robot kit) relies on a CharmedLabs-built Linux-based controller module (Qwerk), explicit recipe instructions for building different kinds of robots on top of it, and requisite software to make the things run.
One key and truly nifty element of the controller and, therefore, any robots you built on top of it, is that it's wireless-ready and can, in fact, interact with information delivered via RSS from various Web sites to the home-made bot. So imagine the pictured flower robot opening and closing its petals based on weather report data delivered from, say, Weatherbug.com .
Currently, recipes exist for the mechanical flower and a three-wheeled telepresence bot. The recipes are freely downloadable from CMU's TeRK web site and you can buy the controller at CharmedLabs.com.
Get all the details on this latest robotics development at PCMag.com.
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April 25, 2007 5:59 PM
I dig it! Now replace those petals with solar panels, and the bot powers itself! ;)