Entries with tag "genetic_programming"

I remember reading about the creations of Theo Jansen years ago, but Jason Kottke's recent post about Jansen reminded me just how cool the guy is. He's a Dutch artist who has been building 'beach animals' for about 14 years now. He makes huge walking skeletons out of plastic yellow tubes, with big sail-like spines to catch the wind, which they use as a source of power. They have valves and pneumatic "muscles" that they use to move their 11-segment limbs. As this Wired article says, "Over the years, successive generations of his creatures have evolved into increasingly complex animals that walk by flapping wings in response to the wind, discerning obstacles in their path through feelers and even hammering themselves into the sand on sensing an approaching storm."

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I've been trying to think of some cool project I can build with my Lego Mindstorms set. JP Brown's site details some cool Mindstorms robots he's made, such as CubeSolver, which solves Rubik's Cubes, Aegis, an auto-tracking squirrel-hunting cannon, and K9, a camera-enabled robotic dog that plays fetch.

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