Centauri's Thoughts

Many sites found today, from 2 sources, howstuffworks.com and from the mars rovers and related sites.

www.superdroidrobots.com
www.oopic.com
www.budgetrobotics.com
www.smartrobots.com
www.machinebrain.com
www.sherlinedirect.com

One thing I have noticed about things built with servos, and that is,they build the servo in place where the rotation is needed to occur. While this may sound quite logical, in the case of a robotic arm, you have 5 servos built INTO the arm (along with their weight. The robot arm must lift the servos And whatever it wishes to pick up.. from the shoulder, this is all the servos for the elbow, wrist, and gripper.
My solution to this is to use gearing and pushrods at those positions, reducing weight (hopefully, not sacrificing too much accuracy from actuator backlash, AKA slop)
In the zero Gee environment of space.. it would not matter much.. but down here, why put the motors up where they are a PART of the total load.
I did see some interesting things today.. which will further fuel my own development efforts, and I have a few things to try this weekend.
One thing I DO see, and that is that robot "kits" can get very expensive!!! good thing I build my own and have the ability to cut, drill, design, etc. Some of these things are anywhere from $700 to $4,000. Many use a computer processor board in the $100 range.
On another note, I learned that the main "brains" behind the current Mars Rovers are no more powerful than my boards of choice.the only real difference is theirs are space and radiation ready, for a small cost difference. Mine costs $100 a board, NASA pays about $200,000 a board... here is an excerpt:

The Onboard Computer
The rovers use a RAD6000 computer produced by BAE systems. This processor is nearly identical in architecture to an old PowerPC processor used in early Macintosh computers. By today's standards, these processors are slow. They run at 20 megahertz, about 1/100th the speed of a typical desktop computer today. They have 128 kilobytes of RAM, 256 KB of flash memory and some ROM to hold the boot code and operating system. There are no disk drives. Although they are slow and incredibly expensive ($200K to $300K per computer), they have two big advantages:
They are radiation-hardened so they are immune to the cosmic radiation falling on Mars.
They run the ultra-reliable VxWorks (PDF) real-time operating system from Wind River Systems.