Update: added some nice pictures from the lab and the robots

There is a small paradox at our department: we are teaching robotics to students, but we used to not have any robots around for them to play with. We actually did have one, that is very very dangerous to use close to people, so I slowly slowly phased it out of use.

But I had to find an alternative: a small, versatile, cheap, robot arm, that we could buy multiples of it and have one for each table of the laboratory. That was how the dream started, and finally, today, this dream came true! Today I finished assemblying and installing the 10th AL5D robot arm in our laboratory!

For quite some time now, I wanted to create a robot model to use it in the classroom. I started imagining it as a 3D printed model, then thought of making it out of styrofoam, converted the idea to carton, but was always stopped by the lack of materials around. Also, the fact that we’ve been teaching online for the past year and a half was not helping.

Last week, I thought of wood. And the moment I thought about it I was wondering how come I didn’t think about this all this time! It is the obvious solution, as there is always wood scraps readily available that I am saving from other projects, plus I have the tools to work with it. So, I spent ~2 years thinking about this, and eventually it took me around 20’ to make it! Here is the result.

I don’t remember when did it exactly happen, but at some point I landed on a elegant looking community blog that is called Less Wrong. They advertise themselves as “[…] a community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making” and the name is derived by the realisation that in order to learn, we must constantly err, but each time less and less.

It is basically a blog where anyone can post essays or ideas on the topic of rationality and real-world applications of it. Applications such as AI, decision making, or community structuring. The site offers a very nice way of commenting and ‘rating’ these essays, and in general it seems like a nice place to be, so I kept visiting it every now and then.