However:
The Hitec Robonova is a great "starter" robot. It's easy to use, has remote control capability natively built in, the servos are reasonably strong and it's pretty strong. It's limited to being an android unless you're into major hackery and you have to spend a bit of money and a hell of a lot of time to convert the Robonova into a hacking platform to test out dynamic walking etc. If all you're ever interested in is fixed motions triggered by remote control, such as wrestling competitions, it's a good kit to buy.
The Bioloid kit is much more flexible but the cost of this is that it's harder to use it for the basic stuff. Getting a remote control Bioloid up and running means some electronic geekery but in tethered or preprogrammed motion sequences it works nicely out of the box. The advantages of the Bioloid are three fold:
- You can make any kind of robot your imagination can think of (providing it's got 18 DOF or less
)- Robotis actively encourage and supply most of the documentation for you to hack the microcontroller, bus system and servos to install your own software.
- The servos supplied with the kit have torque, position and speed feedback across the 1Mbps bus. This means that should you want to investigate dynamic balance you already have the hardware and you only have to spend the rest of your life developing the software.
Statistics: Posted by StuartL — Thu Jun 21, 2007 7:18 pm
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