We've finally come upon a suitable replacment for the venerable, discontinued VPM vibrating pager disk motor. Ah, it was a splendid device, but it sure was easy to break those motor leads... Ah! But the new VPM2 has wires prebonded to the motor, and it's slightly smaller too! We welcome our new vibrating disk motor […]
Frogbots! Solar-powered, at that!
Dave Hrynkiw
December 15, 2000
I missed the full segment of this story last weeks on "Discovery Channel's @discovery.ca" program, but fortunately, the've put the segment online at their website. I seems that JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratories - NASA essentially) is working on a solar-powered, single-footed robot frog. This seems like a GREAT idea for extra-terrestrial planet-surface locomotion. Check out the videos and see for yourself. Additional information at Space.com Even more technical information is here and here, in these Adobe Acrobat files from one of the researchers, Paulo Fiorini. Here's his homepage. And this is his dedicated Frogbot hompage - lots of interesting info!
Oh, and if you scroll to the bottom of the Discovery Channel / EXN page, you'll find a nice video clip of our favorite Roboticist, Mark Tilden. They shot this a few years ago, and I'm glad to see they resurrected it to be on this page.
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Closed Mon, Sept 6th, New Stuff
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OpenBeam's Fantastic Kossel Pro 3D Print...
It's pretty amazing to see the adoption rate of 3D printers in the last few years, and the kind of creativity they bring out in people. I've seen quite a few variations, particularly while walking through the 3D printer villages at the MakerFaires I've already attended (either as a vendor or just a visitor), but […]
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