I’ve always been interested in robotics (particularly of the amateur variety) and
in the past few days I’ve discovered some excellent links. Slashdot ran an
article recently that highlighted the Legway, a lego version
of the Segway, built using the RCX controller from a Lego Mindstorms kit. It’s an
awesome achievement, and very, very spiffy. David Anderson has an incredible home built robot called nBot, which is a
self balancing two wheeled robot. His page is great, with links to a lot of great pictures, video and details about implementation. He also has a nice machine shot where he manufactures these cool robot parts. Truly inspirational.
Larry Barello has a nice page describing his Gyrobot which has a similar control mechanism. Very nice indeed. This page links to a number of MPEG movies of JOE, a self balancing radio controlled robot. They also have a nice paper describing the
implementation and I’m told it’s a subset of their thesis work, which is unfortunately in Italian.

Cool, cool stuff.