Mr. Future

So you love your Lego Mindstorms set, and built many a brilliant contraption. But the gang at the malt shop robotics club just won’t take you seriously when everything you’ve invented is made out of plastic bricks. What’s the next step?

You might want to give CMU’s Terk/Qwerk platform a shot. Developed as springboard for robotics and AI education, Qwerk is the all-singing, all-dancing hardware brain they’ve designed a slew of tools and projects around. It sports a 200 MHz Arm9 processor running Linux 2.6, Ethernet, WiFi, Webcam video support,4 2-amp motor controllers, 16 servo controllers, 16 digital I/Os, a cup holder, a built-in audio player, a Xilinx FPGA, and … more.

But all that hardware would be no jolly good without the wisdom to use it, so CMU has set up a half-dozen project “recipes” to help get you get your feet wet. Their (free) software tools range from a web-cam based remote control and robotic “dance-moves” recorder to a Java development environment and extensions for using the Microsoft Robotics Studio.

Though it doesn’t come with bricks, cogs and wheels, for only $350 Qwerk looks like a steal.

TeRK Link and Qwerk Link

(via KurzweilAI.net )