Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab

Possibly of interest:  very cool robot programming methodology--use 3D printer  plus arduino to make hand held model.  Teach the model, then push to the real robot.

ROBOPuppet from Indiana U.  Really cool!

http://youtu.be/mcF0FTIEiG0

See the web site and conference paper for details.

Anna Eilering, Giulia Franchi and Kris Hauser, “ROBOPuppet: Low-Cost, 3D Printed Miniatures for Teleoperating Full-Size Robots,”  IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September 2014.

Yet more awesomeness out of UIUC Bioengineering.  Tiny Robots!  Powered by muscle tissue! 

Fabbers will be interested that the structures were made using 3D printing techniques, to print out "hydrogel".

See the paper for details.

Well done, all.

UI Press release

Publication:

C. Cvetkovic*, R. Raman*, V. Chan, B. J. Williams, M. Tolish, P. Bajaj, M. L. Sakar, H. H. Asada, M. T. A. Saif, R. Bashir, "Three-dimensionally printed biological machines powered by skeletal muscle" PNAS, 2014. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1401577111. - (download PDF)