Hasta La Gadget!

This robot fights the winter blues. A company called SuperDroid makes large remote-controlled snow plow robots. Use them to clear your front yard, push your cat back to your house, destroy your neighbor’s snowman and more from the warmth and safety of your home.

The robot has six 13″ tiller tires, each powered by a 24V motor. Its 52″ x 16″ snow plow blade is raised and lowered with the help of an air compressor.

Watch the robot do what it does best:

Unfortunately, it does require a remote operator, and isn’t autonomous. SuperDroid can also install additional batteries, chains for the wheels and cameras on the robot. They can even make it work over the Internet so you can control it even if you’re on another continent. But you may not want any of those add-ons once you hear the robot’s basic price. Each one costs an ice cold $7,900 (USD). Dig your browser out of the snow and head to SuperDroid if you’re packing that much paper.

[via Gadgetify]

Who doesn’t want to hang out in the museum after hours? London’s Tate Britain art gallery houses a treasure trove of great works from Hogarth, Gainsborough and Whistler, to Bacon and Freud.

The gallery gets more than a million visitors a year passing through its lofty halls during opening hours, but after dark its passageways fall silent and the works fade from public view.

That’s going to change next summer thanks to the inaugural winners of a prize aimed at expanding access to Tate’s collection via digital means.

Visitors to the Tate’s website will be able to remotely control robots that are left to roam the galleries after opening hours, using torches (and cameras) on the bots to view the works remotely, and in a new light. 

The winning idea of the 2014 iK Prize is the concept of digital product design studio, The Workers, and is called, aptly enough, After Dark. The studio won £10,000 in prize money for the concept, and a further £60,000 to take the project from prototype to ready-for-public-use.

“We’re not trying to give you this perfect representation of the art,” says one third of The Workers, Tommaso Lanza, in the group’s shortlist video (embedded below). “It’s giving the art a different angle, and different light — both figuratively and literally.”

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales was on the judging panel for the prize, announcing the winner yesterday.

Robots have a hard time walking. They’re getting better! But we’re a ways away from having a robot that you can send on an excursion through a dune-covered desert. That’s why, when he wanted to design a robot to collect climate data, designer Shlomi Mir looked to nature. Specifically, to tumbleweeds.

Read more…

Adriá García of DIYMakers augmented a Wall-E toy by making it work with voice commands and giving it the means to move on its own and avoid obstacles. It doesn’t compact garbage or collect curios, but at least it can dance.

Adriá used an Arduino Uno as Wall-E’s new brain. Two infrared proximity sensors help the toy detect obstacles, actuators move its arms and head and two continuous servo motors power its tracks. Adriá used the EasyVR module for voice recognition.

AUTO, navigate to DIYMakers for more details on Adriá’s mod.

[via BonjourLife]

Let us go then, you and I, to meet Skryf, a robot created by Dutch artist Gijs Van Bon. The robot uses a repurposed CNC machine to spray out a thin layer of sand in the shape of letters and Van Bon uses it to print out lines of temporary poetry on sidewalks. As the robot writes, the feet of passersby spread the sand far and wide, destroying the art as it is created.

This video, filmed in July, shows Skryf printing poetry at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. “When you’re writing one [line of] text, another one is going away because people start walking through it,” wrote Van Bon on Dezeen. “Once I’ve finished writing, I walk the same way back but it’s all destroyed. It’s ephemeral, it’s just for this moment and afterwards it’s left to the public and to the wind.”

The robot – basically a standard RC quad-wheel with a fairly impressive sand dispenser on CNC rails – receives its orders and then writes about 130 feet per hour. Van Bon takes cues from the places he’s visiting in order to chose the poets Skryf will write out. For example, at Dutch Design week he chose Merel Morre, the poet of the city of Eindhoven. It’s a beautiful commentary on the value of art versus technology in society and it’s also a pretty nice printing rig that could be repurposed to paint in liquids or even chalk. It’s also a clever way to get people to think about poetry again.