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Spherical Robot Lego Mindstorms NXT-Based
I liked this spherical robot mostly because it's a pretty cool DIY project by Nils Völker done with a Lego Mindstorms NXT robot kit. It is not autonomous; the user controls it via Bluetooth.
(Spherical robot uses Lego Mindstorms NXT)
It uses the same form of locomotion as some other robots you may already know about; see the videos in these articles for more information and diagrams - Rotundus And Rover: Spherical Robotic And Fictional Guardians, Inflatable Spherical Robots May Explore Mars and OrbSwarm Autonomous Spherical Robots.
I also liked this somewhat unique spherical robot - Jollbot Robot Ball Jumps, Bounces And Rolls, which has a pretty good video of Jollbot in action.
Update 04-Jun-2025: Compare this item with the spherical Ruum robot from The Ruum by Arthur Porges.
Jim Irwin had once worked with mercury, and for a second it seemed to him that a half-filled leather sack of the liquid metal had rolled into the clearing. For the quasi-spherical object moved with just such a weighty, fluid motion. But it was not leather; and what appeared at first a disgusting wartiness, turned out on closer scrutiny to be more like the functional projections of some outlandish mechanism. Whatever the thing was, he had little time to study it, for after the spheroid had whipped out and retracted a number of metal rods with bulbous, lens-like structures at their tips, it rolled towards him at a speed of about five miles an hour.
End update.
SF fans (as well as fans of supermacromation) remember the early 1980's series The Terrahawks, which had spherical robots called Zeroids were used to fight the evil witch-like alien Zelda.
(Sargeant Major Zero and Zeroid 18)
From Nils Völker.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 7/11/2009)
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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