The Robot Workshop
 
These pages are just the beginning of an ongoing project. The idea behind them is to continiuously collect information at the workshops i am frequently doing and to turn this information into an internet "how to build a..." or "what is a ...robot" brevier.
so far, i gave these workshos in Bremen (Germany), Karlsruhe (Germany) and Budapest (Hungary) and there is more to come in the nearest future (Linz in Austria and Karlsruhe again). in these sessions i try to teach robotics with a very "hands on" approach (let's just do it). within a couple of days the paticipants are confronted with a some very diverse topics:

- the history of automata and robots (Homunculus, Vaucanson's duck, the chess-turk...).
- machines and robots in the context of sculpture and fine arts.
- actuator technologies (electrical motors, pneumatics, hydraulics...).
- sensor technologies (switches, potentiometers, position encoders, cameras...).
- artificial intelligence concepts (artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms...).
- crafting skills and production techniques.
- basic electronics.
- microcontrollers.

we will take pictures of the little machines that we build and we will describe their design, functionality and programming.

during the first workshop in Bremen we build a very basic six-leg-crawling camerarobot and produced a little videoclip with this device. the robot was controlled by an 8-bit relay interface connecte to the parallel printer port of an old ibm-xt. this very clumsy technology was later made obsolete through the availability of the basic-stamp, a very easytouse microcontroller that is being programmed in a very comfortable basic dialect. as the name already indicates, this computer is very small (size of a stamp) and it consumes very little power which makes it ideal for battery based aplications.
 

other groups working in a similar field are very welcome to contribute to this project.
i will also maintain a list of links to all the artist i know or like, that also work with machines and robots. it seemed to be a good idea to also have here a more general list of robotics related resources.