There are many cool tech toys on the market... But Cubelets make building robots quick and fun.  Cubelets are a new robot construction kit from Modular Robotics.  Snap these small magnetic blocks together, and without further ado your robot starts to sense, plan, and act.  Your robot's behavior depends entirely on how you've assembled the Cubelets; behaviors emerge from the local interactions between  Sense, Think, and Action Blocks -- no single “brain” block and no single “program” controls the robot.  For example, a Light Sense Block atop a Drive Action Block makes a light-fearing robot.  Turn the Drive Action Block around and it’s a light-lover.  The KT06 kit, launching next week at CES in Las Vegas, gets you started with six blocks; meanwhile, the KT01 kit includes a full gamut of Sense, Think, and Action Blocks.  Cubelets are great for little kids; they can build their first robot in seconds, but big kids (adults) find Cubelets just as much fun too. This Cubelets video (below) shows how it works.

Vibrobots (and bristlebots) are simple robots that use a tiny pager / cellphone vibrator motor (with an eccentric weight) to randomly bounce around -- they are the subject of many Maker / DIY projects as well as some well-known commercial toys (such as the $7.00 Hexbug Nano).  Naghi Sotoudeh, a Hizook reader from Iran, contacted us about his latest project: a remote controlled micro-scale vibrobot (measuring just 18 x 12 x 10 mm) that uses two vibrator motors to achieve steerable motion without any wheels.  Naghi's design is similar to some previous steerable vibrobots (eg. the Harvard Kilobot project), but the vibrator motor arrangement gives his design a nice, distinctive faux-wheel look.  The hardware is fairly simple: a small PCB, two vibrator motors, a microcontroller, an infrared photodiode, and a very small battery.  In general, the software for this type of robot isn't too bad either.  In short, this could be a great DIY project and potentially a nice mass-market product.  What do you think...  Would you fork over your hard-earned money for a RC vibrobot kit or pre-built RC vibrobot?