Applied Robotics

Let me clear the air before this one. There are four things to know about me. In no particular order…

1) I love humanoid robots.
2) I love androids.
3) I love drawing humanoid robots…and
4) I love Android OS.

Now that that is out of the way, let me say that this post doesn’t pertain to any of those four, for better or for worse. This post serves to shed some light on some custom robotic applications. As always though,
FTW.

While I am holding it down on Arduino and Lego Mindstorm front, there are, quite thankfully, people utilizing robotics to improve procedures in real situations. Nothing is better than robots, lasers, and gadgetry…unless it falls into another field dear to my heart. Quality assurance. I should trade in my twin monitors in for one of these bad boys:

robots rule
pretty much the opposite of claw-bot

Now that looks like some precision automation exemplified.

So the gist of my rant is that there are automated assembly applications all over the place. You name it, it can be automated…and with some crazy levels of precision… two tenths of a micron precision.

Take a look at a exemplary robotic setup.

explanation
diagrams...always helpful

I could color that sucker green, in an effort to appease my fan-base. Or, alternatively, I could throw up a pic of something slicker than green robots….

pewpewpew
Enhance. Enhance. Enhance

Could those be lasers? Yep…I’m talking about some 6-axis automated inspection system lasers…for the win. I’ll be the first to admit that high performance machine vision, 6-axis robotics, and bad ass software trumps my form of QA…even though our banking software is pretty sweet.

Regardless of the preferences, hit the bump to read about some real robotics applications. They are numerous…from automotive, clean room, fuel cell, medical devise, solar, and semiconductor implementations, to my already-mentioned QA…there is a ton to check out.

In the mean time, I’ll be horsing around with my robot drawings and laser pointers…pining for an Arduino.

Military Laser Weapon (100% awesome)

I love lasers.
I love weapons.
I REALLY LOVE LASER WEAPONS!

me eyez
pew pew pew

U.S. Military…FTW! The latest addition to the arsenal is that bad boy pictured above. Optimus Prime laser, it is not. It is more closely related to the physics professor laser pointer, but way cooler. Like blind a dude from 2.5 miles cooler. Though it’s intended use is to act as a deterrent, I have money on the blinding thing. It is unlikely that the optical scope’s limitations would allow the user to keep that thing out of the target’s eyes 100%, and with a laser intensity high enough to produce a range like that, blindness would surely ensue.

The only thing better than laser-weaponry would be laser-computer-weaponry. Slap a *nix netbook on that sucker…guaranteed I would have one preordered. It would look something like this…

horrible
much better