My soon to be 18 year old is into robotics, and is studying this at uni next year. For Christmas I wanted to get him something fun like a robotic arm – last year he got a wooden one operated by hydraulics which he built and is one of his favourite things. I want to get something a bit more grown up this time, but am confused as to what is good value and has decent longevity. Budget around £100, but would consider higher (or lower).

One suggestion is Lego mindstorms, but this isn’t cheap. What are the cheap(er) Chinese kits off ebay like – things such as this? Or any other suggestions?

He is into Python, so anything that uses that as a programming language would be a plus.

Whichever of the Chinese kits you get, you will need an Ardunio or similar to control it. It’s straight forward to use Python with it as well.

You oculd try asking on one of the Ardunio forums?

What about buying him a 3d printer kit to build?

Starting prices just over your budget but he could print his own designs for robots/arms/vehicles/printer upgrades then and maybe even make a few quid printing things for other students (or at least cover the cost of his own materials and electronics for projects).

As loxy suggested – 3DP will allow him to print all the parts to make his own, and a zillion things aside. I love mine – easily the most useful thing I own…

Not sure he’s really into the 3d printing side of things – despite the programming in python stuff he is more of an engineer than a computer nerd. He’d rather tinker with a robotic arm than with a computer and 3d software.

Also he’ll be at university next year and they have enormous (room sized) 3d printers and CNC machines available for all students to use.

Don’t want to hijack and this may be of use to you too. Are there any good simulators around? I want to do some stuff with drones and swarm mapping but I a) don’t want to buy a load of drones and b) break a load of drones. Player stage is a bit inaccessible.

I once did a hack weekend where they had modified remote controlled cars which could be controlled from a PC over wifi and had IR sensors. We could  write software to control the cars and we tried to make them autonomously navigate a race track. Massi something like that would be fun? Not sure of cost though.

What course is he doing at uni? If it’s  a robotics related course I’d be surprised if it didn’t involve a significant amount of computer nerdery.

Player stage is a bit inaccessible

Player/stage and gazebo for 3D is probably the most widely used for that sort of thing, or roll your own with unity/unreal.

What’s your background and what do you actually want to sim? Eg flight dynamics or coverage, or multi platform sensor fusion (and what sensors) etc…

I’d echo the commments about robots being a lot about the software. Not entirely, but smarter software to enable simpler robots is the way of the world. If it wasn’t for the software comment I’d have suggested an intel real sense dev kit to play with rather than an arm. Arm control is hard, software wise, if you want any degree of autonomy, of course you may not! But sensors are the eyes of a robot, and nearly all robots only exist to move sensors through the world, hence the realsense suggestion – its a 3D camera (that’s a simplification but you get the idea)

 or roll your own with unity/unreal.

Been considering this, have experience with Unity and am currently learning Unreal anyway… I don’t actually really want to simulate any real world dynamics so maybe one of those is the way to go. I basically want to play with a swarm creating maps (of e.g. caves) using vector field histograms and sharing data (I work for a distributed data platform company so want to use that for the sharing, it does p2p replication). It’s nothing serious, just for my own amusement. I have a masters in AI & robotics but haven’t used the AI or robot bits since I left uni around a decade ago, still have the interest though :).

Well, you could sim that with something simple and 2D, wouldn’t even need a gui really, you could design “maps” in excel, write out a CSV then load that… simple grid world, class to handle movement and sensing.

All depends the level of detail and what bit tickles you the most, e.g. if you go to one extreme, you have full 3D, robots running SLAM so they’ve got egocentric world maps you somehow need to match and merge and so on… or if you just care about path planning to enable some sort of implicit co-ordination then the above 2d gridworld example is fine.

Multi-agent co-ordination/reasoning was my PhD, and I’ve worked in robotics about 15 years on and off, including multi-platform mapping, so you really did hit my specialist subject with your question 😉

My advice would be, decide what the interesting part of the problem is (to start) and sim only the bare minimum for that. You can always expand later.

Anyway, we digress off-topic.To get back on topic, have a browse of:

https://robots.ros.org/

Find an arm (or robot) that’s cheap and has good ROS support – it’ll be easier* to get it up and running to do cool things. MoveIt is the ROS arm path planning library, widely used.

*still requires a lot of computer geekery.

Umm robotics is about 50% computers, you need computers to make em work. The mechanics side of things is only part of it.
My 11 year old is supremely into robots and she has worked out that she needs to be able to program them. There is no avoiding the IT geekery if you want to be a robotics engineer. Otherwise he will be a technician.

A good route into control (although potentially very frustrating) would be to get him a drone kit- all the mechanical gear with a microcontroller. Means he gets to fiddle with putting it all together, also teaches him a bit about basic control theory (as above, forget about robotics unless you’re willing to learn control)

Unfortunately doesnt look like a bundle is up on humblebundle at the moment but the various Make magazines/project specific books will probably be worth a look.

Or something from No starch press (in both cases go to the publisher websites to get the best prices outside of humble bundle specials) if you go for electronic only copies.

Both have a range of offerings covering a range of different robotic options, Make also has a bunch of kits as well but since its USA not sure about shipping etc (various uk retailers have their stuff though). Assuming he has a clue about the subject whilst it would ruin the surprise I would just sit down with him and ask him for his opinion. My guess would be Ardunio or Pi and then a robotics kit would suit him,