Robot Sunday: Building a tower? Try this!

Ever found yourself building a tall structure from bricks? It's such a pain. The Lemmings you hired to do the job have run out of bricks after a limited (but surprisingly large, given the size of their bag) number of bricks, shrugged and walked away. The human builders you got in to replace them keep whining about pay and conditions, and something about sugars in their tea. It's time to call in the robots.

In a move so genius, I'm genuinely gutted I didn't think of it first, the FRAC centre in Orléans, France, in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, have trained four quadrocopters (oh, how I love quadrocopters; see: every other post on this blog) to lift and carefully place bricks into the shape of a 20ft tall roundish tower (other tower shapes are presumably available). They've also released a video of the whole process, start-to-finish, including the lovely brick-obtaining shelf where someone replaces the brick each time it's picked up, shots of a crowd of random spectators who come to enjoy the project, and of course as much footage as you like of brilliant robots picking up blocks using some kind of pin-based gripping device, and flying them into place.

The original article I found on it, which gives a little more background, can be found here.

Robot Wednesday - Cubelets

As a big fan of both robots and Lego, I was excited to discover that someone on the internet has used the phrase "The Lego of Robotics" (in fact, quite a few people have) - and all of them, literally without exception, are talking about Cubelets.

Cubelets, which are described in the weird and patronising publicity video below, manage to overcome the problem of being marketed by oddballs, and still somehow leave me with a burning desire to forego trivialities such as food, and instead spend this year's entire sustenance budget on tiny cubes I can stick together and impel to perform actions in response to stimuli from their environment.

They're currently only available on pre-order, but it looks like they launch at the end of June. Wow, just in time for my 27.17808219th birthday! Anyone feeling particularly generous, you know what to do.