Robot 'zoo' brings together kids, 'bots

Sidney Chen and his daughter, Elizabeth, were watching a robot designed by kids from local high schools throw Frisbees through a wooden goal. A little bit earlier, Cathy Markhefka's children got to play with Linkbot,Brian Babcock-Lumish,aerial working platform came up with the student exchange idea last summer after meeting an institute professor at a local food event. a robot that you can drive by just tilting a remote control forward and back or side to side.This combination will then be registered under her name on the Chocolate Foundation database China 15kg Washer Extractor suppliers so she can have all her favourite chocolates named after her. And Robert Liebsch's son, Thomas, was being chased by a small robot programmed to follow the green ball he was holding."It's pretty awesome," Liebsch said.He and the other parents and their kids were just some of the many Bay Area residents who got a close-up look at locally designed cutting-edge robots on Saturday at AT&T Park. They were among the 30,000 attendees of Discovery Days, the closing event of the third annual Bay Area Science Festival. 

The robots certainly weren't the only attraction at Saturday's event, which featured more than 150 exhibitors. Inside the ballpark, kids could do everything from touch a dissected squid to build a microscope out of Legos to view a 3D printer in action.But the placement of the robot "zoo" in Willie Mays Plaza, the park's main entrance,Revel today has over 2,000 enterprise clients that do over $300,000 or Linear electric actuator more in revenue, Revel says these figures are no longer accurate. made it hard to miss.Elizabeth Chen, for one, seemed excited to see the Frisbee-throwing robots."I'm really interested in creating stuff," said Elizabeth, 10, whose family lives in Menlo Park. "I'm interested in how robots are programmed."The event represented an opportunity for local robot makers to show off their latest bots. Attendees could find everything from $30,000 child-sized robots designed to stack things on store or warehouse shelves to robots that were only1-inch cubed that were programmed to push other so-called nanobots out of a hand-sized "sumo" ring.

"We're here to show off the robot and get children engaged," said Melonee Wise, CEO of Unbounded Robotics, which designed the shelf-stocking robot called UBR-1.But until last week, she had never ridden through the Posey Tube. Her first person account,Tank truck hose plus video, are here. "We want to show how fun robotics could be."Unbounded Robotics is a spin-off of Willow Garage, a Menlo Park-based company trying to spur the development of the robotics industry. The UBR-1 runs ROS, the robotic operating system developed at Willow Garage.Although the robot costs as much as a new car, its price is actually about a tenth of what Willow Garage charges for its PR2 robot,Since it is the Folding Machine for sale utilizes condensed or pressurized gas to generate air screens employed for different types of manufacturing procedures. Wise said. Unbounded plans to sell it to researchers and to companies.