VacBot

Bob Baxter and Keith Rowell's Vac-mobile in the 2006 rice contest.

Syndicated 2006-10-02 17:20:00 (Updated 2012-11-21 20:17:26) from Keith Rowell

Knewt at Beep Beep Gallery

Knewt makes an appearance at the opening of Beep Beep gallery in Midtown.

I went to the Beep Beep gallery opening and displayed some robots and cards to promote our club. It's a small space with a cool sign off Ponce between downtown and Virginia Highlands. There were easily 100 people there. There was food and drinks and music. It was quite a party. There were about 10 to 15 artists represented. Knewt and "entourage" sat on a table with a stack of AHRC cards. The party was still going on at 11:30 when I packed them up.

keith, thanks for the forward and the cool email. people really liked your robots alot. i'm glad you had a good time.

Mark Basehore

Syndicated 2006-09-17 21:14:00 (Updated 2006-09-17 21:54:57) from Keith Rowell

Knewt wins First Place

Knewt and his trophy sit on the Dekalb Tech 6 axis CNC milling machine

Knewt wins First Place in the Open Competition
of the 2006 AHRC Robot Rally

Video

First and formost I'ld like to recognise Knewt's team members, Stuart Rolf and Bob Baxter for the fine work that made Knewt possible. We ran 3 motion routines on the parallax board that proved that the robot could move about and stand on one foot without falling down. The "not falling down" I think was the "clincher".

The Rally overall was a lot of fun, there was a fine array of robots present and I'm proud for Knewt to be recognized by such a prestegious group. Thank you AHRC for such a fine event.


Bob Baxter, Stuart Rolf, Keith Rowell

Syndicated 2006-05-19 19:39:00 (Updated 2012-12-22 18:17:49) from Keith Rowell

Frank Borowick presents me with the first place trophy as Richard Bodor looks on.

COOOL! Well done, Sir. Were you way ahead of the also-rans?
Bill Hotch

There were 4 others, 1 lego with a hand (end affector), one with a camera, a butler, and a line follower. Knewt was less than 1 point above 2nd place. These are some very clever guys.

http://www.botlanta.org/rally2006/scores.html

http://www.botlanta.org/rally2006/index.html

Syndicated 2006-05-19 17:44:00 (Updated 2006-05-19 21:44:37) from Keith Rowell

Knewt on the floor of the Open Competition Arena

Thanks to Dale and Ann Hetherington for the fine photos.

Syndicated 2006-05-19 17:43:00 (Updated 2006-07-05 04:31:37) from Keith Rowell

commenting on the movements

Syndicated 2006-05-17 17:01:00 (Updated 2006-05-17 17:01:13) from Keith Rowell

Creative Loafing covers the Dorkbot meeting

creative loafing article

Putting the "bot" in dorkbot that evening was presenter Keith Rowell. Rowell screened video clips of robots, including robots walking, robots running, robots fighting one another, robots shooting flames, a stylish robo-rhino, and much to the amusement of the audience, a robot kicking a wastebasket down a set of steps. When finished, he fired up his own creation, a biped robot named Knewt. It looked like a robo-dinosaur.

Andisheh Nouraee

Syndicated 2006-01-21 15:04:00 (Updated 2013-01-04 15:48:37) from Keith Rowell

Knewt Presents at the first Dorkbot Atl meeting

Dorkbot presentation

Dorkbot is an art group that is making use of technology as a medium. Their motto is "people doing strange things with electricity". There were about 30 people there and they seemed to have a good time.

Knewt was 3rd on the agenda following Greg Kellum and Craig Dongoski.

Greg's endeavor uses a computer and midi dimmers to control lights. He did a very cool "layering" of control to add hand motions from a data glove, on top of a programmed sequence. It had an eerie "ethereal" effect, like dappled shade of trees in the breeze, or sun through broken clouds. He explained all the technical aspect pretty thoroughly.

Craig showed a system for reaching the "sound of drawing". He controls various electronic input with the user's input on a special piezo board that makes the drawing process "audible". The samples we listened to were very thought provoking. In the "nonsense" one could make out the scratching of a pen, breathing, barking, voices. The objective it seems is to evoke images from the listeners sub-consciousness. I'ld say it works, because you can't really discern the noises, but they are strangely familiar. Like a tool for getting into the creative "zone".

These are two fine examples of interface technology being used for creative purposes. Art being the motive. I wonder what it would look like to have art techniques being used for technological purposes? A cliche might be conductive paint used as circuitry. Any other suggestions?

In Knewt's portion of the show, I showed lots of the reference material that inspired Knewt to be built in the first place, and talked about what makes up the "robot aesthetic" in general comparing the "cute" factor in Japanese design to the "terminator" factor in American movie robots. The response was very good, I think it was a success.

Thanks to Jason Freeman for organizing the meeting and for having Knewt on the agenda.

Syndicated 2006-01-15 16:14:00 (Updated 2006-01-15 17:21:00) from Keith Rowell

Motion with Head

a short motion sequence with head on

I'm not happy with the way Knewt "leans" when shifting weight. This is one of the issues I set out to solve when Knewt was started. The change in 2.0 to add more weight shifting ability, has re-introduced this leaning. It's not so bad really, but I would prefer that the head was kept perfectly level. I'm going to have to look into this more closely.

Syndicated 2005-12-29 16:19:00 (Updated 2005-12-29 16:26:38) from Keith Rowell

Two Heads Are Better Than One

two heads are better than one

This photo shows the finished metallic head next to the un-finished white head. It was a couple of days work to get the head to the metallic state. I'll outline the steps here.

The STL process leaves a groved surface in random patterns as a result of the building process. I consulted Scott Washington who won awards at the IPMS/USA 2005 nationals modelling competition. Scott reccomended filling the gaps with Squadron white putty mixed 1:1 with Testors liquid glue. This is a pretty toxic smelling brew so be warned. The glue thins the putty to make it more spreadable. The pitfalls to avoid in using this on an STL model is to make sure you cover all the gaps. Since the entire surface is textured, it's easy to miss a spot. I put the putty on with a brush wich leaves brush strokes, creating a texture of it's own. I will try using a popsicle type mixing stick to apply the putty in the future to see if that works any better.

This putty dries pretty quickly. I began sanding after about 3 hours using successively finer grits of paper. 150, 220, 320, 600. This is the step when you find the spots you've missed. Stop here and fix these spots, then re-sand. The paint won't fill the gaps.

I sprayed the metallic paint on avoiding drips and runs. The next day when that was dry, I gave it a coat of Future Floor Polish. This makes the metallic finish have a slightly lighter color and smooth's the surface like glass, increasing reflectivity.

Notice the logos on the sides. These are custom decals made with Testors custom decal kit. The kit contains special paper, a spray fixative, and software. I wasn't able to get the software to even load, so I used photoshop to compose and print. The decal material is transparent. This fact slipped my mind and I was suprised to see that white areas on the logos were now silver when I applied them. This makes a cool effect though on the large red background area of the IronCAD logo, as the red is translucent and the silver highlight shows through. Another thing to be aware of is that the decal material is flexible. This is a big advantage to covering curved surfaces without wrinkles. But beware of sliding the decal around as the water dries. I pulled on a corner and stretched the decal material, slightly distorting the image. Be sure the decal is where you want it before drying away the water with a towel.

After the decals were dry I added another coat of Future floor polish.

I'm dissatisfied with the silver paint and am looking for a high quality replacement.

Syndicated 2005-12-13 13:29:00 (Updated 2005-12-13 16:08:13) from Keith Rowell