Re: amateur robotics

[mfb@mbunix.mitre.org (Michael F Brenner)]

  > Any inexpensive robots that can be controlled from a home computer?

I do not know of any inexpensive ones, but here are a couple of ideas
that can start you off. Naming particular brands is just to start
you off and does NOT constitute an endorsement or a recommendation 
for any particular brand (my experience is with a very limited
number of manufacturers of these items):

  (a) a buffered multi-serial board from Black Box, Western Digital, etc.
  (b) a 64-reed-relay board from Eagle, Carry-I, etc.,
      to turn things on and off,
  (c) radio control switches from Jackson, Radio Shack, etc. 
      or radio control servos from Ferrettronics, etc.
  (d) stepper motors from National Control Devices, ACP, etc.
  (e) an Ada-to-JavaByteCode interface to use the robots at URLs
      http://jubilee.learning.cs.cmu.edu:8080/command.html
      http://webcam.engsoc.carleton.ca/
      http://telerobot.mech.uwa.edu.au/
  (f) an old truck (volunteer to help Paul for one show at
      Survival Research Labs on Bruno Street in San Francisco
      in order to learn how to use computers to make trucks and
      farm equipment fight themselves to the death)
  (g) digital cameras, microphones, audio systems, votrex boards,
      voice recognition boards, laser weapons, airplanes, cars, 
      robot arms, aritifical intelligence systems, extropian
      devices to upload your mind to the Net, and biological
      and non-biological neural nets from the usual manufacturers 
      of those things.

Sorry that nothing on my list is free or even particularly cheap. 
Hope that others will post less expensive stuff because I am
interested in realtime, distributed systems (that is, robots).