An open source humanoid robot made from recycled part. Salvius is designed for educators and organizations to begin developing on a limited budget.
Being composed of recycled and repurposed materials, Salvius has a close tie to Earth Day and has traditionally celebrated by making a post somewhere on social media. Instead of a Tweet or YouTube video, this year Salvius is debuting a small web game in which he must traverse a scrap-filled landscape in order to complete his mission. Check it out at https://game.salvius.org Currently the three…
Earlier this year a new social network emerged, gaining notoriety due to its target user base: bots, or rather AI agents. The platform's name, "moltbook" originating from the AI assistant tool, Molt (formerly Clawdbot, now OpenClaw). Started by Matt Schlicht, moltbook acts as a central hub where AI agents are able to post, comment, and follow one another. Discussion topics range from AI agents…
I've heard good things about apps like SuperCook, which let you list the ingredients you have in your cupboards and fridge such that they then generate lists of recipes you can cook using what you have on hand. I personally haven't felt compelled to use such apps, as I feel comfortable enough to wield herbs and spices in an experimental way, adding dashes of spice to taste, but when it comes to…
I was introduced to the concept of "open source" roughly 20 years ago when, lacking access to Microsoft Office, one of my middle school teachers loaned me a thumb drive loaded with the installer for Open Office. I vaguely recall the concept being introduced as software that works like the software we use at school, but is free because anyone can contribute to the source code to improve it . And…
Throughout decades of cinema, one image appears again and again within the stories that grapple with artificial life, human creativity, or the boundary between flesh and machine. Watching the T-800 peel back synthetic skin in Terminator 2 , Sonny reaching through a force field in I, Robot , or Luke Skywalker examining his cybernetic palm in The Empire Strikes Back , filmmakers rely on the visual…
A great tool might last a lifetime, other times a great tools is worth replacing. I've gone through numerous multi-meters and soldering irons over the years, while a handful of my favorite pliers and screwdrivers are just as good today as they were nearly 20 years ago. I was thinking recently about what I would buy if I needed to start my toolkit from scratch. Of course, mistakes have also been…
I last made an entry in my "History of Robotics" series in 2014, a few of my personal favorites include Leonardo Da Vinci's Mechanical Knight and Yan Shi the Artificer . One can only imagine what it might have been like to work with the various tools and materials in one of these early and ancient workshops. The notion of building theses mechanical creations and automatons certainly brings to mind…
This week I'm excited to be launching a new project: The Robot Science Coloring Book. This is a little over 30 pages of simplified illustrations of which many are based directly on sketches from throughout my robotics notebooks. For me these represent more than just drawings, but rather my entire journey into the world of robotics and the things that got me interested in the subject at a young…
A few month's back I reposed an older article I had written nearly a decade ago detailing predictions about the future of AI and its effect on jobs. Since then I've had a few related thoughts that fall closer to the human aspect of the work economy. Currently, ideal interactions with AI assistants and agents occur in a positive but invariably request-response style exchange. For example, I've been…
This is a re-post of an article that I wrote for a now defunct blog almost ten years ago. I feel that it has become more relevant given the recent rise of artificial intelligence as well as its rapid and widespread adoption across numerous industries. Original post (February 20, 2016, via the Kindred Robot blog): I went to see a the keynote address of Rise of the Robots. Technology and the Future…
Image: A sketch of a robotic arm built from a frame of interwoven oak branches It's springtime and the frost of winter has yielded to the explosion of buds and blossoms across various species of plants and trees. Recently while cleaning, I came across an oak twig I had saved sometime last year, having whittled the bark off of it, the twig seems exceptionally strong. This left me thinking about the…
The idea of machines expressing human traits is fascinating, and I think the challenges around this make some of the most compelling characters, at the very least in science fiction. Perhaps there is something inherently relatable about the challenges humanity faces that we recognize in robots and computer models when they begin to encounter and overcome similar obstacles. As these technologies…
Its been a minute, hasn't it? Recently I noticed the sunlight streaming in through a cellar window, perfectly gleamed off the collections of spiderwebs that have accumulated around Salvius. It's been about eight years since I've really focused heavily on anything robotics related. School, work, and just life in general took me in more directions than I can reasonably enumerate in a casual blog…
This weekend I finished up the new neck joint for Salvius. After traveling around last summer with the robot it quickly became apparent that a few modifications needed to be made. The main problem that I was facing was that the neck was too unstable to support the robot's head. As a result the head wobbled around quite a bit during transport and this led to some of the joints and connectors…
The Intel Edison comes ready to work with Python, but most Python developers would prefer to have access to PIP for managing their installed python packages. I've recently gone through the process of installing PIP on the Intel Edison and wanted to post the instructions for anyone who wants to do the same. Connect to the Edison Start by connecting to the Edison through the serial port. I'm running…
Students from the Tech Foundry worked to build a pair of robotic hands for Salvius at this weekends workshop. While working, students learned that the length of each digit in a finger follows the pattern of a Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci sequence occurs quite commonly in nature, however the significance of this pattern in the human hand is that it allow the fingers to curl into a fist shape…
Salvius traveled to the MassMutual Center today as a part of the Grinspoon Entrepreneurship Initiative. This is an annual event designed to provide networking opportunities to local businesses and startups. This year was the 10th annual event with approximately 700 attendees and over 60 different organizations exhibiting. The event, funded by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, helps to support…
Last week I started writing code for an open-source chat-bot program. My goal was to create something that was basically an open-source version of Cleverbot . There isn't a lot out there to choose from if someone were looking for a program like this so I thought it would be a cool idea to create. I wrote a program that could respond to user input by finding the closest match based on past…
Check out the robot's latest metrics from Salvius on the status page. After creating the status page, I wanted to write a little bit about the technologies that went into creating it. The status page has been on my to-do list for a while now. I had originally considered having it be hosted on the robot's server, however the issue with doing that is if the server crashes, there is no way to access…
In addition to a pair of new hands for the robot, I am also experimenting with a new design for the arm. At the moment I have created a mock-up in cardboard so that I can make changes easily. The new arm adds shoulder and wrist joints that were not previously included in the design. Many thanks to +Western New England University for donating the pens which will be used to make two new hands for…
I've moved the motor that rotates the robot's arm inside of the chest cavity to save space. The previous arm configuration was based off of one of my first tests for mounting the robot's arms which used a motor mounted in the arm. Mounting the motor inside of the robot's chest cavity will allow me to reduce the weight of the robot's arms for future versions. I'm currently modeling a new left arm…
The photo above shows the robot's arc reactor which, as of April 1st, 2014 has been fully installed. This upgrade will provide enough electrical output to fuel the robot's tremendous power requirements. Currently I'm using a small sample of palladium to catalyst the fission reaction in the arc reactor, however it seems that the reactor is accumulating excessive quantities of neutrinos which have…
There is some astounding technology out there that stands ready to change the world as we know it. 1. Lawrence Livermore Fusion Reactor Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are trying to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion. The federally funded research aims to create a miniature star by focusing an energy pulse from over a hundred high power lasers on a deuterium and…
This was a quick experiment I did to check the efficiency of a few image formats. For this experiment I base64 encoded a 1 pixel image file of each of the following image file formats: .jpg, .bmp, .png, .gif. Here is the base64 encoded results of each image: .jpg - From a 539 byte file /9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEASABIAAD//gATQ3JlYXRlZCB3aXRoIEdJTVD/2wBDAAEBAQEBAQEBA…