BEAM Robotics Workshop
I’m planning to have a BEAM robotics workshop at the next Curiosity Show (Saturday 7th April, St-Mary-At-The-Quay, Ipswich, 10am to 4pm).
BEAM is an acronym that stands for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics and Mechanics. As such BEAM robotics promotes the value of biological forms and aesthetics in the design of the “creature”, where “form follows function”. The behaviours are usually reactive, for instance to light or sound and the circuits simple, using the fewest possible components. The components themselves are often recycled, soldered together in a free-form way (without a circuit board) making the creature’s body. Many are solar-powered.
There are loads of different types of BEAM robots; some move like the Solar Rollers and others like the Sitters sit! There are many examples out there - some of my favourites are the work of Zach DeBord.
So my proposal is to bring together people, electronics and soldering irons on Saturday 7th and build some BEAM robots for ourselves. If you’re interested in participating, please let me know - I’m going to need quite a bit of help to make this happen.
Cheers,
Dave
Comments
Jonathan on 10 April 2007
At the show on Saturday I mentioned the Senster (by the late Edward Ihnatowicz) as being an early example of a BEAM-like robot. My faulty memory had it down as a World Fair thing from the 50s, but it turns out it was made for the Philip’s theme park at Eindhoven at the start of the 70s. There’s an interesting site at http://www.senster.com with pictures (including circuit boards and diagrams, and other wonderful stuff).
dave on 15 April 2007
Thanks Jonathan - that’s great!
I have put a couple of photos on flickr of the two bots I have built following Alex Weber’s Instructables project.
Going to rerun the workshop to build more of these in the next couple of weeks - let me know if you’re interested.
Cheers,
Dave
Jonathan on 12 May 2007
If you have a look at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathan_clift you’ll see my first Instructable. I built it a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve only just gotten around to doing the code (PIC assembler rather than the C that Alex used). It seems to work ok, though it’s not always easy to tell if it’s gone into the programming mode. Next thing is to start playing with different input and output devices.
All the best,
Jonathan
PS I hope the link works ok - I don’t understand how to do the nice ones with alternative text that the rest of you seem to manage.