A team of researchers at ETH Zurich have created another cool autonomous robot. Big surprise there, right? These eggheads are going to kill us all. Well, this robot is capable of picking up odd shaped rocks and stacking them on top of each other.
They presented the robot at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Singapore, where it rocked the house. Get it? Check out the video below, or read the research paper here.
It knows what it is doing when stacking odd shaped rocks. This robot would be great at building a dam out of rocks, or a garden wall of rocks. Maybe we could use it to build Trump’s border wall – and make the robots pay for it.
[via IEEE Spectrum via Laughing Squid]
Last year, artist and inventor Neil Mendoza turned a hamster running in a wheel into art. How do you follow up such a feat? By creating a rock band of course. Powered by real rocks.
In his latest work, Neil turned rocks into an actual rock band that plays a cover of The Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun. You would think that something by the Rolling Stones would have been more appropriate.
The band is basically a bunch of electromechanical devices that make music by firing small rocks at aluminum keys, spinning rocks and hurling them against a piece of marble, or by slapping larger stones with fake leather. The rocks are both the musicians and the instruments. The band’s lead is a computer with a MIDI player.
Want to build one yourself? Mendoza has created an Instructables tutorial showing you how. This is true rock music.
[via Sploid]
