a history of cybernetic animals and early robots
See Quester details and other references in David Buckley's website here. Quester was originally designed to be a micromouse maze solver, and later converted into a general purpose robot with added gripper (see above). David also has a reference to the history of Micromouse competitions here. For the original Micromouse competition, "The Amazing MicroMouse Maze …
Read More “1981 – Quester Micromouse – David Buckley (British)”
"Moonlight Special" Photo at Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories Top – "Moonlight Special" , Middle- "Moonlight Flash" , Bottom Right – "Midnight Express" all in full dress. In 1977, Machine Design sponsored yet another mouse contest, "The great Clock Climbing Contest", coupled with the rediscovered information of the 1972 "Le Mouse 5000" contest that spurred on …
Read More “1977-79 – “Moonlight Special” Battelle Inst. (American)”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – Feb 1, 1967 …….. He [Professor Meredith Wooldridge Thring, 51, professor of mechanical engineering at London's Queen Mary College] suggested a trip to one of his laboratories. "Here you see our mechanical rat," he explained. He pointed to a gadget about the size of a boy's electric train. Before it lay a …
Read More “1966 – Mechanical Rat – Meredith Thring (British)”
pdf – Popular Electronics October 1962 Bionics Bionic "Mouse." As mentioned earlier, RCA is working on a far more complicated moving-target indicator containing hundreds of neurons which operates on the same principle. But perhaps the most important piece of neural-bionic hardware to come out of the laboratories so far is a "bionic mouse" built by the …
Now in the Vienna Technical Museum. Period photo showing Richard Eier opening the covers of the Labyrinth. Zitat: Gerhard Chroust, "Cybernetic Animals at the Technical University of Vienna" , in IFSR Newsletter, Vol. 18, Nummer 2, Seite(n) 2, 1999 CYBERNETIC ANIMALS AT THE TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA G. Chroust Around 1960 Cybernetics was the path …
Read More “1959 – Labyrinth solver with Ariadne’s Thread – Zemanek & Eier (Austrian)”