Control of Power-Assist Exoskeleton Robots With Biological Signals
by Kazuo Kiguchi
A viable power-assist exoskeleton robot — sometimes called a power suit, man amplifier, or man magnifier — is something that many people in industry, military, and medicine, have been anxiously waiting for. Recent progress in robotics technology has increased the number of power-assist exoskeleton robots that have come onto the scene. It is important that a power-assist exoskeleton robot automatically assists the user’s motion according to that motion intention in real time ... Page 38

Building a Stepper Mottor Controller | Part 2
by Fred Eady
Now that I have a Minebea 29SM-K series 1.8°-per-step stepper motor shaft spinning back and forth on the bench, I figured it might be a good time to sit down and tell you how I persuaded an STMicroelectronics L6208PD to push current through the Minebea’s stepper motor coils. Unfortunately, I can’t provide a visual play-by-play of my Minebea’s alternately spinning motor shaft. However, I can give you a description of the hardware and software stuff you will need to make your motor spin under ... Page 50

Designing and Building a Robot from Scratch | Part 1

by Brian Benson
When you are creating a custom robot, there is no manual, instructions, or tech support. You start with a blank slate, with thousands of options available to you. You have to ask yourself and answer questions like “How big will it be? What will power it? What materials will I use for the frame?” and many more. With an unstructured approach, this can seem like an impossible task. However, if you approach the problem with a plan, breaking down the problem into chunks, it is not as difficult as... Page 62

Robytes
by Jeff Eckert
Robytes | March 2008 | Climbing the Walls
In the common tradition of borrowing robotic concepts from nature is Waalbot, which needs no magnets or vacuum devices to attach itself to vertical planes. Like a common gecko, this Carnegie Mellon (www.cmu.edu) invention uses tiny fibers on its feet to adhere to just about any surface. The little guy isn’t much bigger than a quarter, but he sports two sets of three-footed wheels, each with its own motor. The spring-loaded tail keeps the critter pushing against the wall’s surface ... Page 08

Twin Tweaks
by Bryce Woolley, Evan Woolley
Back to Basics
As a mechanical engineering student, Evan has been learning about things like how Bessel functions are the eigenfunctions of the Sturm-Liouville Equations that can be used to describe heat conduction in nonrectangular geometries, and how computational methods like the Newton-Raphson method can be used to find the solution to large nonlinear systems. Such highbrow concepts in engineering — however interesting they might sound — can only be mastered with a firm grasp on the fundamentals of ... Page 14

Different Bits
by Heather Dewey-Hagborg
Artificial Life | Part 1 | Introduction to Genetic Algorithms
Have you ever questioned the meaning of “life?” I’m not talking about existentialism here, but the meaning of the word — life — what it means to be alive? Have you ever wondered, for example, if there was some way, some possibility, that an electronic creation (your electronic creation) could one day be deemed alive? Page 67

Appetizer
by Allison F. Walton, Filomena Serpa
When Art and Servos Mix
When we were at FLOAT — the Floatation Center and Art Gallery — we started thinking about what we should pick for our December art show, robots as art came to us in an instant. Why not fill our gallery with DIY Bay Area robotic art? Hell, everyone loves robots, don’t they? And isn’t it the next brick and mortar Internet, the job of the future? Who knew how much work we were going to be taking on ... I guess we should be careful what we ask ... Page 78