If you’re interested in building your own ASIMO, you’ve got to start somewhere. Kinematics’ modular TinkerBots provide a very great jumping-off point, letting you quickly assemble and program your own robots.
According to Kinematics CEO and co-founder Matthias Bürger, the mix-and-match bricks are designed to “grow with a child” by offering various programming options after they’re put together. Each set of bricks is built around a red “Power Brain” brick, an Arduino microcontroller kitted out with a two-hour battery, a USB port for charging it up, a Bluetooth module, a speaker, and a basic control panel that includes record/play/volume buttons.
Once you snap together a contraption, you can program it in a few different ways. By pressing the “record” button on the Powerbrain brick and twisting the robot’s motorized parts, it will remember those movements and replicate them when you hit the “play” button. And if you want to step it up and write your own code, you can also program your robots via the Arduino IDE.
A number of different kits will be available for the TinkerBots system, and one of them will let you control your creations via Bluetooth from a mobile device. The car kit lets you drive a vehicle around via an Android app (an iOS version of the app is coming soon), steering it with touchscreen controls or accelerometers, depending on the vehicle.
In addition to a bunch of fun modules--a grabber claw, light and distance sensors, twisting and pivoting joints, motors and wheels, and even propellers so that you can make your own flying quadcopters--the TinkerBots system is also compatible with some bricks you may already have laying around the house: Legos, which snap right onto a special plate that attaches to some of the TinkerBot bricks.
TinkerBots started out as an Indiegogo campaign, and it blew past its $100,000 goal in less than a week; its funding now is nearly double that amount, with about a month left to go in its campaign. You can preorder various kits now, and prices vary depending on the number and type of pieces in each set. For $160, you get a basic car-building set with the Powerbrain, motors, wheels, a twister joint, and some other bricks. There’s an animal-themed set for $230, a grabber claw set for $400, and $500 gets you a fully loaded kit with bricks to build anything.
