Hands-on with the Cubelets modular robotics kit Video

Hands-on with the Cubelets modular robotics kit Video Transcript

I'm Paul Sloan with CNET and I'm here at CES talking to Eric Schweikardt who has designed these robotic toys, Modular Robots. Show us what they are and tell us what they do? Speaker 2: All right. This is Cubelets and it's a Modular Robotic Construction Kit... kits. Like we use to play with Legos and (erector?) sets when we were kids and these are construction kits with all sorts of robotic elements built in. Bunch of different cubes. They all do different things. The black block are sensor blocks. Like a temperature sensor or a light sensor or a distant sensor that can detect my hand. The clear blocks are action blocks. The do things... the output like a speaker block, or this flashlight block, or a bar graph block or with a little block with wheels that's driving around in front of these guys and all the colorful blocks in between are thinking blocks, so they're like little bits of intelligence that you try and embed in between the input and output. Speaker 1: So what kind of things can these robots do once you build them. It sounds like you can build them anyway you really want. Speaker 2: Put them together at any way. Mobile robots that drive around on the table. You can create robots that communicate with each other, you can make a robot that drives until it's senses the edge of the table and stops. But basically you're building (additively?), so we start out with maybe the simplest possible robot you can build. So of one these, one sensor or light sensor , one actuator of bar graph to cover up the light sensor and the bar graph goes up. But then you can add some intelligence in there. Like a pink block, it's an inverted block, put it in between and it reverses the behavior. Cover up the light sensor and Speaker 1: Speaker 2: Speaker 1: Speaker 2: Speaker 1: Speaker 2: