It’s Saturday, it’s the turn of another post of the James Bruton focus series, and it’s Boxing Day in the UK and most of the Commonwealth countries. Even if this holiday has nothing to do with boxing, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to take it literally and bring you a project in which James teamed up with final year degree students in Computer Games Technology at Portsmouth University to build a robot that fights a human in a Virtual Reality (VR) game.

As every other Saturday, I’m bringing you another cool open-source project from James Bruton. Today, how about becoming an experimental musician with your own barcode scanner synthesizer?

What if you could ride your own giant LEGO electric skateboard, make a synthesizer that you can play with a barcode reader, or build a strong robot dog based on the Boston Dynamics dog robot? Today sees the start of a new series of videos that focuses on James Bruton’s open source robot projects.

This summer we used our Strider optimizer coupled with rapid prototyping in LEGO to refine its 10-bar linkage.

Cyberbotics Ltd. is launching https://robotbenchmark.net to allow everyone to program simulated robots online for free.

by Nicholas Charron

The need for fast, accurate 3D mapping solutions has quickly become a reality for many industries wanting to adopt new technologies in AI and automation. New applications requiring these 3D mapping platforms include surveillance, mining, automated measurement & inspection, construction management & decommissioning, and photo-realistic rendering. Here at Clearpath Robotics, we decided to team up with Mandala Robotics to show how easily you can implement 3D mapping on a Clearpath robot.

By Tully Foote

We are excited to show off a simulation of a Prius in Mcity using ROS Kinetic and Gazebo 8. ROS enabled the simulation to be developed faster by using existing software and libraries. The vehicle’s throttle, brake, steering, and transmission are controlled by publishing to a ROS topic. All sensor data is published using ROS, and can be visualized with RViz.

The Robot Academy is a new learning resource from Professor Peter Corke and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the team behind the award-winning Introduction to Robotics and Robotic Vision courses. There are over 200 lessons available, all for free.

The lessons were created in 2015 for the Introduction to Robotics and Robotic Vision courses. We describe our approach to creating the original courses in the article, An Innovative Educational Change: Massive Open Online Courses in Robotics and Robotic Vision. The courses were designed for university undergraduate students but many lessons are suitable for anybody, as you can easily see the difficulty rating for each lesson. Below are lessons from inverse kinematics and robot motion.

Would you like to make a robot to grasp something, but you think that is impossible to you just because you can’t buy a robot arm? I’m here to tell that you can definitely achieve this without buying a real robot. Let’s see how:

In this video, Philip “Robo-Phil” English offers a tutorial on programming your NAO robot for human interation. Enjoy!

You probably know the Sphero robot. It is a small robot with the shape of a ball. In case that you have one, you must know that it is possible to control it using ROS, by installing in your computer the Sphero ROS packages developed by Melonee Wise and connecting to the robot using the bluetooth of the computer.

This comprehensive tutorial offers a step-by-step guide to using UgCS software to plan and fly UAV drone-survey missions.

This handy video-tutorial course gives an introduction to the Robot Operating System (ROS), including many of the available tools that are commonly used in robotics. With the help of different examples, the tutorials offer a great starting point to learn programming robots. You will learn how to create software including simulation, to interface sensors and actuators, and to integrate control algorithms.

In these snappy tutorials, Robo-vlogger Philip English (a.k.a. “Robo-Phil”) introduces a method of programming your NAO robot how to walk and talk using Python.

So – you’ve built a robot arm. Now you’ve got to figure out how to control the thing. This was the situation I found myself in a few months ago, during my Masters project, and it’s a problem common to any robotic application: you want to put the end (specifically, the “end effector”) of your robot arm in a certain place, and to do that you have to figure out a valid pose for the arm which achieves that. This problem is called inverse kinematics (IK), and it’s one of the key problems in robotics.