Carnegie Mellon makes it easy for laypeople to build robots Options

[usr.c]

This one's from a few days ago: "Carnegie Mellon University unveiled a new project Thursday designed to help people make robots from parts found at the local hardware store.

The Telepresence Robot Kit, dubbed Terk, was developed by Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor of robotics, and his team at the Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment Lab at CMU. The project got financial help from Google, Microsoft and Intel.

"Everything is open source and public domain," Nourbakhsh said. "There is no incentive to make money here. None of the corporations that funded are looking to license this. These companies gave us gift money--even better than grant money because there's no strings--to help us try and come up with ways to get people to be more creative with tech and more tech-literate."
Photos: DIY robots from recipes

Instead of a complete kit, the Terk offers DIY "robot recipes," recommending off-the-shelf parts as ingredients, with one exception. To make it easy for laypeople to create and control robots, Terk recipes recommend the Qwerk, a Linux computer with robot-controlling software that resides on the robot. It was developed in conjunction with CMU by Charmed Labs, a company based out of Austin, Texas, and costs $350."

Read the whole article here (CNET News) and view the gallery pictures here. More info about TeRK is available here and the official press release is available here.

[Goodpeople]

WOW!!!!