From Lem at Robots Dreams:

There isn’t a lot of information available yet, but here’s what is rumored so far:

The new robot dog, named the Omnibot i-SODOG, is expected to have realistic dog-like movement utilizing 15 custom designed servo motors. It will feature voice recognition and respond to hand signals using motion detection sensors. In addition to a dedicated remote control that looks similar to the i-SOBOT humanoid control unit, i-SODOG can be controlled using a smartphone. We’re guessing that the interface will be Bluetooth.

My first thought was, “look at that face!” And then I thought, how cool would it be if the company that will release this robot, Takara Tomy, had a Thingiverse page where you could go and download different faces designed to work with their product?

RoboSpider

I’ve been thinking for a while now about how I could make a walking toy insect that would be powered by just one little motor.  No fancy electronics, just one motor, turning in one direction at a constant speed – making a little robot walk.  I’d really rather it ran off of a rubber band or a spring, but baby¹ steps.

I really like the existing walking robot projects out there.  The DogBot and the ModHex are very cool, but they seem to require a pile of servos each.  Up until very recently, I didn’t have a good idea of how I could make something that could walk without the use of a very complicated Theo Jansen style walker.  While tinkering with idea based on arkatipe’s bugbot, I started searching for videos of insects walking and eventually found a video of a real spider walking and an animated spider walking.

I’ve included a little sketch of how I generally conceive of the idea as working.  Two smaller gears on the left and right of a larger gear, which makes the two outer gears turn in the same direction and speed.  There’s a bar that attaches to each of the outside gears and will rotate in a very wide elliptical fashion.  A set of four of these could possibly be run off of a single worm gear.  Half of the assemblies would be set to be on the downward rotation as the other half are rotating upwards. ²

Let me know what you think of this project.  I’ve uploaded my design files along with some other notes to Thingiverse.  Would you be interested in hearing about my OpenSCAD designs?  Do you want to know what additional OpenSCAD design tricks I used that are not in my series of OpenSCAD tutorials?  Do you want to about the print results from the first draft?  Do you have some suggestions?

1. spider [↩]
2. Although, you could probably  have this work with only two moving assemblies and two stationary ones rotating around. [↩]