It's been in the coming for a while, and now is the time to release it to the webosphere (yes, I said "Web-o-sphere"). Since Solarbotics Ltd. took over HVW Technologies, we simply couldn't ignore some of the benefits of microcontrollers. Really, they're not that scary. Many of them even look like our good friend the […]
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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Having Online Order Difficulty?
If you've been having any problem whatsoever with our online orderform, would you be so kind to fire us a quick message about it? We're trying to isolate a problem we're hearing about, but cannot reproduce, especially with the final "submit" button. A copy/paste of the error message to us would be greatly appreciated...
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