Some Great Things from MIT

One of my goals with this blog is to inspire people to think differently about robotics. Industrial robots  basically do the “3 Ds”, i.e., dirty, dangerous and dull. Toy robotic sets such as Bioloid are just fun to play with but not really useful. Cleaning robots such as the Roomba are useful, but limited and not much fun. We are pretty used to seeing stuff like that around.

A few groups are working hard to think differently about how we interact with robots. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has a ground breaking department called the MIT Media lab, Personal Robotics Group which creates very innovative and often strange interactive robots.

For those who don’t know it, MIT Media Lab had a hand in developing Mindstorms for Lego (Ref Wikipedia).  Knowing how much MIT has done for the Mindstorms community, I often check out their page. I think “Let’s see what they are doing for me now!” I recommend getting into this page and looking around and watching some videos. You will say to yourself “why are they doing that???” and “that’s just odd!!”, but I guarantee you will see something that will certainly inspire you.