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Smart Ball Android Spherical Robot
The Smart Ball is a small plastic spherical robot that you can control with your Bluetooth-capable Android phone. The interface that you use to control the Smart Ball is the simplest possible; tilt your cell phone in the direction that you want the ball to roll, and there it goes.
(Smart Ball video)
The balls are actually prototypes for a real commercial product, and were made by hacker group Gearbox. The Gearbox folks have already opened up the APIs (the parts that let programmers create apps to control the balls) and have been running hack weekends where people can come along and try them out.The Gearbox people are aiming for a price of around $25, and already have games planned or written.
SF fans (as well as fans of supermarionation) 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)
Update 04-Jun-2025: Compare this item with the 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.
Roll over and click on these links to see more amazing spherical robots:
- Jollbot Robot Ball Jumps, Bounces And Rolls
Take a look at this Jollbot video for a better look at its unique rolling jumping gait. - Inflatable Spherical Robots May Explore Mars
The proposed devices would have a soccer ball-style surface, with hexagonal solar panels gathering energy. - Spherical Robot Lego Mindstorms NXT-Based
A pretty cool DIY project by Nils Völker done with a Lego Mindstorms NXT robot kit. - Spherical Soft Robots Use Shape Memory Alloys
...we employ soft actuators to controllably deform a robot body, enabling it to crawl and jump on rough terrain. - OrbSwarm Autonomous Spherical Robotics
Take a look as OrbSwarm bots roll around. - Rotundus Groundbot Robotic Spherical Guardian Video
GroundBot weighs just 25 kilograms and rolls easily on its special polycarbonate shell.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 8/8/2010)
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