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October 14, 2019
4:00
Gutted Hoverboard Becomes Formidable Track-Drive Robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

When “hoverboards” first came out, you may have been as disappointed as we were that they did not even remotely fulfill the promises of Back to the Future II. Nothing more than a fancified skateboard, hoverboards are not exactly groundbreaking technology. That doesn’t mean they’re not useful platforms for hacking, though, as this hoverboard to track-propelled robot tank conversion proves.

Most of the BOM for this build came from the junk bin – aluminum extrusions, brackets, and even parts cannibalized from a 3D-printer. But as [pasoftdev] points out, the new-in-box hoverboard was the real treasure trove of components. The motors, the control and driver electronics, and the big, beefy battery were all harvested and mounted to the frame. To turn the wheels into tracks, [pasoftdev] printed some sprockets to fit around the original tires. The tracks were printed in sections and screwed to the wheels. Idlers were printed in sections too, using central hubs and a clever method for connecting everything together into a sturdy wheel. Printed tank tread links finished the rolling gear eventually; each of the 34 pieces took almost five hours to print. The dedication paid off, though, as the 15-kg tank is pretty powerful; the brief video below shows it towing an office chair around without any problems.

We noticed that [pasoftdev] found the assembly of the tread links a bit problematic. These 3D-printed links that are joined by Airsoft BBs might make things a little easier next time.

Tags: robots hacks
October 04, 2019
22:00
Tiny Robots That Grow Taller (And Wider)
» ‎ Hack a Day

Sometimes one just needs an extra hand or six around the workbench. Since you’re a hacker that should take the form of a tiny robot swarm that can physically display your sensor data, protect you against a dangerously hot caffeine fix and clean up once you’re done. [Ryo Suzuki] and [Clement Zheng] from the University of Colorado Boulder’s ATLAS Institute developed ShapeBots, small shape-shifting swarm robots that aim to do exactly that and more.

The robots each consist of a cube shaped body with 2 small drive wheels, onto which 1-4 linear actuator modules can attach in various positions. For control the robots’ relative positions are tracked using an overhead camera and is shown performing the tasks mentioned above and more.

To us the actuators are the interesting part, consisting of two spools of tape that can extend and retract like a tape measure. This does does lead us to wonder: why we haven’t seen any hacks using an old tape measure as a linear actuator? While you likely won’t be using it for high force applications, it’s possible to get some impressive long reach from a small from factor. This is exactly what the engineers behind the Lightsail 2 satellite used to deploy it’s massive space sail. Space the two coils some distance apart and you can even achieve full 2-axis motion.

You can also control your swarm using your favourite wifi chip or have them skitter around using vibration or 3D print some linear actuators.

Thanks for the tip [Qes]!

Tags: robots hacks
October 03, 2019
16:00
Amazing Open Source Quadruped Capable Of Dynamic Motion
» ‎ Hack a Day

The more we read about [Josh Pieper]’s quadruped, the mjbots quad A0, the more blown away we are by his year of progress on the design. Each part of the robot deserves its own article: from the heavily modified brushless motors (with custom planetary gears) to the custom motor driver designed just for this project.

[Josh], realized early on that the off-the-shelf components like an ODrive just weren’t going to cut it for his application. So he designed his own board, took it through four revisions, and even did thermal and cycle testing on it. He ended up with the compact moteus board. It can pump out 400 Watts of peak power while its 3Mbit control protocol leaves plenty of bandwidth for real time dynamic control.

The motors and gearboxes are also impressive. It took thorough experimenting and taking inspiration from other projects before he arrived at a 8108 quad copter motor modified and upgraded so heavily its own mother wouldn’t recognize it. This is all packed into a leg unit with three degrees of freedom that puts even the fanciest servo based quadruped to shame.

Finally it’s all packed into a neat four-legged robot frame with batteries and a Pi. You can get a video summary of the robot here or after the break, and we recommend reading his blog for some more images and details.

Tags: robots hacks
September 23, 2019
22:00
RPi Tank Invades Living Room, Teaches OpenCV
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’re looking for a simple project to start exploring the intersection of OpenCV and robotics, then the RPi Tank created by [Vishal Varghese] might be a good place to start. A Raspberry Pi and a few bits of ancillary hardware literally taped to the top of a toy M1 Abrams tank becomes a low-cost platform for testing out concepts such as network remote control and visual line following. Sure, you don’t need to base it around an Abrams tank, but if you’re going to do it you might as well do it with style.

As this is more of a tech demonstrator, the hardware details are pretty minimal. [Vishal] says you just need a relatively recent version of the Raspberry Pi, a MotoZero motor controller, and a camera module. To provide juice for the electronics you don’t need anything more exotic than a USB power bank, which in his case has been conveniently attached to the top of the turret. He doesn’t provide exact details on how the MotoZero gets wired into the Abram’s motors, but we imagine it’s straightforward enough that the average Hackaday reader probably doesn’t need it spelled out for them.

Ultimately, the software is the heart of this project, and that’s where [Vishal] really delivers. He’s provided sample Python scripts ordered by their level of complexity, from establishing a network connection on the Raspberry Pi to following a line of tape on the ground. Whether used together or examined individually, these scripts provide a great framework to get your first project rolling. Literally.

Line following robots, in their many forms, have been a favorite hacker project for years. Whether they home in with an analog circuit or replace the lines with hidden wires, they’re a great way to get started with semi-autonomous robotics.

Tags: robots hacks
September 22, 2019
10:00
Watch Legged Robot Run Circles Around Its Bigger Brethren
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Ben Katz] posted about bringing the Mini Cheetah (center, above) robot to the 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) held in Montréal, where it shared the floor with others for a workshop focusing on real-world deployment of legged robots. Those of you who haven’t been keeping up with legged robots may find yourselves delightfully surprised at the agility and fluid movements of this robot. Mini Cheetah may lack the effectors or sensors of the bigger units, but its nimbleness is undeniable.

[Ben] shared some footage of the robots together, and at about 7:22 in this video Mini Cheetah can be seen showing off a bit of flexing, followed by running around a larger unit. Another, shorter video is embedded below where you can see all the attendees moving about in a rare opportunity see them all together. You can even see the tiny one-legged hopping robot Salto if you watch closely!

The Mini Cheetah robot has been something of a favorite here at Hackaday. The inspired design, the detailed documentation, and the effective use of low-cost parts all help make it a fascinating project to read up on.

Tags: robots hacks
September 21, 2019
16:00
Larger-Than-Life Game of Operation is the Future of Healthcare
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s hard to beat the warm memories of Hasbro’s Operation, a game that boils down the fine art of surgery to removing farcically named plastic bones and organs. Just in case you can’t conjure up the memory, the game board looks just like this huge version of it, but normally sits flat on the table and is no larger than… well, a board game. Players take turns using a tethered tweezer to remove butterflies from your stomach without touching the metal sides of the incision area. If the tweezers touch the metal, a buzzer goes off and the player loses a turn.

Of course, we now live in the future and robots do our difficult surgeries while the talented doctor looks on from a video console. So, [Ben] and [Jonathan] built themselves an oversized upright version of the game that includes a CNC-wielding surgery robot.

Delightfully, the controls are designed like a coin-op arcade machine and the three-axis CNC machine they’ve built is a new take on the claw machine. It has a gantry that moves left and right, a head that moves up and down along that gantry rail, and an actuator that moves in to snatch those pesky organs. Limit switches cut the power to the motors if the axis moves too far.

In true robosurgery fashion, there’s a webcam that goes along for the ride to give the surgeon a close-up look. Just stay away from those edges! There’s a button on the tip of the actuator that sets off the alarm if you miss the hole and hit the surface of the board, thereby ending your turn. Each organ is made of foam, faced with a piece of sheet metal, and hung from a hook made of coat hanger wire. That sheet metal allows the gripper to use an electromagnet to pick each piece up.

The project is called Sergio and you can see it demonstrated in the video below. We first met these hackers last fall at Maker Faire New York when they were showing off a giant Connect Four game where you play against the computer. It’s nice to hear they’ll be exhibiting Sergio at Philadelphia Maker Faire two weeks from now.

Tags: robots hacks
7:00
OpenLeg – The Open Source Robot Leg
» ‎ Hack a Day

There’s an old saying about standing on the shoulders of giants, but how about doing so with an open source leg? Well, your robots might do so at least, thanks to OpenLeg, a new open source project for building robot legs. Created by [Joey Byrnes], this started out as a senior project for a course at the University of Illinois. The idea is to create a robot leg that others can use to build four-legged robots that can amble around the neighborhood, much like those built by Boston Dynamics.

The project is off to a good start: the sample videos that [Joey] has produced show that the prototypes of OpenLeg can produce a variety of motions, from literal kick-boxing moves down to a more conventional walking gait. It is mostly 3D printed, with a few bits of carbon fiber adding strength. The leg is driven by a large 50 Kv motor designed for electric skateboards driven by an ODrive controller that handles most of the complexities of driving a big motor like this and handling the kinematic and other complex stuff. The idea is that you could eventually just plug the design into your own robot and set it walking with a few lines of Python, but that’s still a ways off.

We’ve seen a lot of quadruped robot projects recently, from James Bruton’s OpenDog to Alphred from RoMeLa at UCLA, but more is better for projects like this. Especially with projects that take a more modular approach so you can pick and choose for your own Sarah Connor hunting devices.

Tags: robots hacks
September 20, 2019
19:00
Meccano Max Gets Hacked
» ‎ Hack a Day

There are plenty of “smart” toys out in the marketplace, some with more features than others. Nevertheless, most makers desire complete control over a platform, something that’s often lacking in any commercial offering. It was just this desire that motivated [MrDreamBot] to start hacking the Meccano Max.

Meccano Max is a small-statured companion robot, at about 30 centimeters high. Not content with the lack of an API, [MrDreamBot] decided to first experiment with creating an Arduino library to run Max’s hardware. With this completed, work then began on integrating a Hicat Livera devboard into the hardware. This is an embedded Linux system with Arduino compatibility, as well as the ability to stream video and connect over WiFi. Thus far, it’s possible to control Max through a browser, while viewing a live video feed from the ‘bot. It’s also possible to customize the expressions displayed on Max’s face.

Oftentimes, it pays to replace stock hardware rather than try and work with the limitations of the original setup, and this project is no exception. With that said, we’re still hoping someone out there will find a way to get Jibo back online. Look after your robot friends! Video after the break.

Tags: robots hacks
September 17, 2019
19:00
Your Next Robot Needs Googly Eyes, And Other Lessons from Disney
» ‎ Hack a Day

There are so many important design decisions behind a robot: battery, means of locomotion, and position sensing, to name a few. But at a library in Helsinki, one of the most surprising design features for a librarian’s assistant robot was googly eyes. A company called Futurice built a robot for the Oodi library and found that googly eyes were a very important component.

The eyes are not to help the robot see, because of course they aren’t functional — at least not in that way. However without the eyes, robot designers found that people had trouble relating to the service robot. In addition, the robot needed emotions that it could show using the eyes and various sounds along with motion. This was inspired, apparently, by Disney’s rules for animation. In particular, the eyes would fit the rule of “exaggeration.” The robot could look bored when it had no task, excited when it was helping people, and unhappy when people were not being cooperative.

The actual purpose of the robot is to help patrons find books or sections they want, through a touch screen allowing the user to search for a book or category. The MiR200 robot’s original purpose was to move books between floors, but that doesn’t require much social interaction.

Perhaps you wonder what the emotion code — or all the code — looks like? Go check it out on GitHub. If you want to build a pair of googly eyes, grab some stepper motors and read a post from [BikerGlen].

In the future, the robot may get eyebrows to even further express the little robot’s emotions. If you build something similar and want to do your own take at eyebrows, we got you.

Tags: robots hacks
4:00
Speed Up Filming With This Jawdropping 8-Axis Camera Crane
» ‎ Hack a Day

These days, it can feel like a project doesn’t exist unless you’ve posted a video on the Internet about it. [mingul] was in the process of producing his own videos, but found having to repeatedly move and set up the camera tiring. Naturally, a completely overkill eight-axis motion control robot was the solution. Video embedded below the break.

The scale of the build is something to behold. With 4.5 m travel on the X-axis, 6.5 m on the Y, and 2.1 m on the Z, it’s capable of traversing the full length of [mingul]’s workshop. Tilt, pan, and roll axes all feature 540 degrees of rotation, and there’s motors to control zoom and focus on the camera, too. Through software like Dragonframe, it’s possible to program complicated camera moves, and techniques like the classic dolly zoom are a cinch with such a versatile rig. It’s also possible to control the movement in real-time with a wireless Xbox controller.

[mingul] reports the build took a full three months of CNC machining, 3D printing and assembly. It’s a big step above a simple motorized camera slider, but we all have to start somewhere.

[Thanks to Tom Lynch for the tip!]

Tags: robots hacks
August 31, 2019
22:00
Double 3: Your Instant Physical Presence Anywhere, No Matter Where You Are
» ‎ Hack a Day

Telepresence is one of those futuristic buzzwords that’s popped up a few times over the decades; promising the ability to attend a meeting in New York City and another in Tokyo an hour later, all without having to leave the comfort of your home or office. This is the premise of Double Robotics’ Double 3, its most recent entry in this market segment, as the commercial counterpoint to more DIY offerings.
More than just a glorified tablet screen.
Looking like a tablet perched on top of a Segway, the built-in dual 13 megapixel cameras allow the controller to get a good look at their surroundings, while the 6 beamforming microphones should theoretically allow one to pick up any conversation in a meeting or on the work floor.

Battery life is limited to 4 hours, and it takes 2 hours to recharge the built-in battery. Fortunately one can just hop over to another, freshly charged Double 3 if the battery runs out. Assuming the $3,999 price tag doesn’t get in the way of building up a fleet of them, anyway.

Probably the most interesting aspect of the product is its self-driving feature, which has resulted in a whole range of sensors and cameras (Intel RealSense D430 stereo vision depth sensors) being installed. To handle the processing of this sensor data, the system is equipped with an NVidia Jetson TX2 ARM board, running Ubuntu Linux, which also renders the mixed-reality UI for the user with way points and other information.

Currently Double Robotics accepts sign-ups for the private beta of the Double 3 API, which would give developers access to the sensor data and various autonomous features of Double 3’s hardware. Co-founder of Double Robotics, [Marc DeVidts] stated to Hackaday that he is looking forward to seeing what people can build with it. Hopefully this time people will not simply take the thing for a joyride, like what happened with a predecessor of the Double 3.

Tags: robots hacks
August 30, 2019
1:00
Building A Robot Rover For Those Tough Indoor Missions
» ‎ Hack a Day

Making an outdoor rover is easy stuff, with lots of folk having them doing their roving activities on beaches and alien worlds. Clearly the new frontier is indoor environments, a frontier which is helpfully being conquered by [Andreas Hoelldorfer]’s Mantis Rover.

OK, we’re kidding. This project started out life as a base for [Andreas]’s exquisite 3D printable robotic arm, but it’s even capable of carrying people around, as the embedded video after the break makes abundantly clear. The most eye-catching feature of the Mantis Rover are its Mecanum wheels, which allow it to move in any direction, and is perfect for those tight spots where getting stuck would be really awkward.

The Mecanum wheels are 3D printed, making the motors and the associated controllers the more complicated part of this package. Plans for the wheels involve casting some kind of rubber, to make the wheels more gentle on the floors it has to drive on. The electronics include TMC 5160 motor drivers and an STM32F407VET6 MCU, as well as a W5500-equipped custom ‘Robot Shield’.

It seems that there are still a lot of tweaks underway to make the project even more interesting. Maybe it’s the perfect foundation for your next indoor roving sessions at the office or local hackerspace?

Tags: robots hacks
August 28, 2019
13:00
Skid Steer Mows Airport Grass Autonomously
» ‎ Hack a Day

Sure, mowing the lawn is a hassle. No one really wants to spend their time and money growing a crop that doesn’t produce food, but we do it anyway. If you’re taking care of a quarter acre in the suburbs it’s not that much of a time sink, but if you’re taking care of as much grass as [Roby], you’d probably build something similar to his autonomous skid-steer mower, too.

This thing isn’t a normal push mower outfitted with some random electronics, either. This is a serious mower that is essentially a tractor with blades attached to it. Since it’s a skid steer, it turns by means of two handles that control the speed of the left or right drive wheels. Fabricating up some servo linkages to attach them to specialized servos takes care of the steering portion, and the brain is ArduPilot hooked up to a host of radios, GPS, and a compass to allow it to drive all around the runways at the airport without interfering with any aircraft.

This is a serious build and goes into a lot of detail about how servos and linkages should behave, how all the software works, and the issues of actually mounting everything to the mower. The entire project is open source too, so even if you don’t have a whole airport runway to mow you might be able to find something in there to help with your little patch of grass.

Thanks to [Vincent] for the tip!

Tags: robots hacks
August 27, 2019
11:30
A Car Phone — No, Not That Kind
» ‎ Hack a Day

Autonomous vehicle development is a field of technology that remains relatively elusive to the average hacker, what with the needing a whole car and all. Instead of having to deal with such a large scale challenge, [Piotr Sokólski] has instead turned to implementing the same principles on the scale of a small radio-controlled car.

Wanting to lower the barrier of entry for developing software for self-driving cars, he based his design off of something you’re likely to have lying around already: a smartphone. He cites the Google Cardboard project for his inspiration, with how it made VR more accessible without needing expensive hardware. The phone is able to control the actuators and wheel motors through a custom board, which it talks to via a Bluetooth connection. And since the camera points up in the way the phone is mounted in the frame, [Piotr] came up with a really clever solution of using a mirror as a periscope so the car can see in front of itself.

The software here has two parts, though the phone app one does little more than just serve as an interface by sending off a video feed to be processed. The whole computer vision processing is done on the desktop part, and it allows [Piotr] to do some fun things like using reinforcement learning to keep the car driving as long as possible without crashing. This is achieved by making the algorithm observe the images coming from the phone and giving it negative reward whenever an accelerometer detects a collision. Another experiment he’s done is use a QR tag on top of the car, visible to a fixed overhead camera, to determine the car’s position in the room.

This might not be the first time someone’s made a scaled down model of a self-driving vehicle, though it’s one of the most cleverly-designed ones, and it’s certainly much simpler than trying to do it on a full-sized car in your garage.
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Tags: robots hacks
4:00
3D Printed Rover Enjoys Long Walks on the Beach
» ‎ Hack a Day

More than a few hackers have put in the considerable time and effort required to build a rover inspired by NASA’s robotic Martian explorers, but unfortunately even the most well funded home tinkerer can’t afford the ticket to send their creation offworld. So most of these builds don’t journey through anything more exciting than a backyard sandbox. Not that we can blame their creators, we think a homebrew rover will look just as cool in your living room as it would traipsing through a rock quarry.

But the DIY rover status quo clearly wasn’t sufficient for [Jakob Krantz], who decided the best way to test his new Curiosity-inspired rover was to let it frolic around on the beach for an afternoon. But judging by the video after the break, his beefy 3D printed bot proved to be more than up to the task; powering through wildly uneven terrain with little difficulty.

Beyond a few “real” bearings here and there, all of the key components for the rover are 3D printed. [Jakob] did borrow a couple existing designs, like a printable bearing he found on Thingiverse, but for the most part he’s been toiling away at the design in Fusion 360 and using images of the real Curiosity rover as his guide.

Right now, he’s controlling the rover with a standard 6 channel RC receiver. Four channels are mapped to the steering servos, and a fifth to the single electronic speed control that commands the six wheel motors. But he’s recently added an Arduino to the rover which will eventually be in charge of interpreting the RC commands. This will allow more complex maneuvers with fewer channels, such as the ability to rotate in place.

We’re proud to count our very own [Roger Cheng] among the rover wrangling hackers of the world. An entire community has sprung up around his six-wheeled Sawppy, and the knowledge gained during its design and construction could be applicable to any number of other projects.

document.createElement('video'); https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/3dprover_video.mp4
[via /r/3dprinting]

Tags: robots hacks
August 18, 2019
4:00
ArduRover Boat Uses Tupperware To Float
» ‎ Hack a Day

There’s nothing quite like the sight of a plastic box merrily sailing its way around a lake to symbolise how easy it is to get started in autonomous robotics. This isn’t a project we’re writing about because of technical excellence, but purely because watching an autonomous tupperware box navigate a lake by itself is surprisingly compelling viewing. The reason that [rctestflight] built the vessel was to test out the capabilities of ArduRover. ArduRover is, of course, a flavour of the extremely popular open source ArduPilot, and in this case is running on a Pixhawk.

The hardware itself is deliberately as simple as possible: two small motors with RC car ESCs, a GPS, some power management and a telemetry module are all it takes. The telemetry module allows the course/mission to be updated on the fly, as well as sending diagnostic data back home. Initially, this setup performed poorly; low GPS accuracy combined with a high frequency control loop piloting a device with little inertia lead to a very erratic path. But after applying some filtering to the GPS this improved significantly.

Despite the simplicity of the setup, it wasn’t immune to flaws. Seaweed in the prop was a cause of some stressful viewing, not to mention the lack of power required to sail against the wind. After these problems caused the boat to drift off course past a nearby pontoon, public sightings ranged from an illegal police drone to a dog with lights on its head.

If you want to use your autonomous boat for other purposes than scaring the public, we’ve written about vessels that have been used to map the depth of the sea bed, track aircraft, and even cross the Atlantic.

Tags: robots hacks
August 11, 2019
1:00
DIY Personal Assistant Robot Hears and Sees All
» ‎ Hack a Day

Who wouldn’t want a robot that can fetch them a glass of water? [Saral Tayal] didn’t just think that, he jumped right in and built his own personal assistant robot. This isn’t just some remote-controlled rover though. The robot actually listens to his voice and recognizes his face.

The body of the robot is the common “Rover 5” platform, to which [Saral] added a number of 3D printed parts. A forklift like sled gives the robot the ability to pick things up. Some of the parts are more about form than function – [Saral] loves NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, so he added some simulated solar cells and other greebles.

The Logitech webcam up front is very functional — images are fed to machine learning models, while audio is processed to listen for commands. This robot can find and pick up 90 unique objects.

The robot’s brains are a Raspberry Pi. It uses TensorFlow for object recognition. Some of the models [Saral] is using are pretty large – so big that the Pi could only manage a couple of frames per second at 100% CPU utilization. A Google Coral coprocessor sped things up quite a bit, while only using about 30% of the Pi’s processor.

It takes several motors to control to robot’s tracks and sled. This is handled by two Roboclaw motor controllers which themselves are commanded by the Pi.

We’ve seen quite a few mobile robot rovers over the years, but [Saral’s] ‘bot is one of the most functional designs out there. Even better is the fact that it is completely open source. You can find the code and 3D models on his GitHub repo.

Check out a video of the personal assistant rover in action after the break.

Tags: robots hacks
August 02, 2019
11:30
An Exoskeleton Arm For A Hacker On A Budget
» ‎ Hack a Day

Whether it is motivated by a dream of superhuman strength courtesy of a mech suit or of mobility for those with impaired muscle function, the powered exoskeleton exerts a curious fascination among engineers. The idea of a machine-augmented human body achieving great things is thwarted though by the difficulty of the task, actuators and power sources small enough to be worn comfortably represent a significant challenge that is not easily overcome. It’s a subject that has captivated [Kristjan Berce] since at a young age seeing his grandmother struggling with lifting, and he presents a working powered exoskeleton arm as a proof of his ideas.

It’s a wonderful exercise in low-tech construction with hand tools and a drill press on pieces of aluminium and wood. Motive power comes from an automotive windscreen wiper motor, and electrical power comes from a hefty LiPo attached to the device’s harness. There is a feedback potentiometer incorporated into the elbow joint, and an Arduino oversees the operation under the direction of a pair of glove-mounted buttons. It’s certainly impressive to see it in the video below lifting a bicycle, though we wonder how its weight might affect someone with less muscle function than average.

Projects like this one are very good to see, because there’s a chance that somebody out there may be helped by building one of these. However there is always a note of caution to be struck, as the best solutions come from those who need them and not those who merely think they have the solution. We have written about the Engineer Saviour Trap here in years past.

This isn’t the first prosthetic arm we’ve seen though, we covered a hackerspace in England printing one for a local youngster.

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Tags: robots hacks
July 30, 2019
11:30
Pick and Place Robot Built with Fischertechnik
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’d be entirely wrong to think that Fichertechnik is just a toy for kids. It’s also perfect for prototyping the control system of robots. [davidatfsg]’s recent entry in the Hackaday Prize, Delta Robot, shows how complex robotics can be implemented without the hardship of having to drill, cut, bolt together or weld components. The added bonus is that the machine can be completely disassembled non-destructively and rebuilt with a new and better design with little or no waste.

The project uses inverse kinematics running on an Arduino Mega to pick coloured objects off a moving conveyor belt and drop them in their respective bins. There’s also also an optical encoder for regulating the speed of the conveyor and a laser light beam for sensing that the object on the conveyor has reached the correct position to be picked.

Not every component is ‘off the shelf’. [davidatfsg] 3D printed a simple nozzle for the actual ‘pick’ and the vacuum required was generated by the clever use of a pair of pneumatic cylinders and solenoid operated air valves.

We’re pretty sure that this will not be the last project on Hackaday that uses Fischertechnik components and it’s the second one that [davidatfsg] has concocted. Videos of the machine working after the break!

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Tags: robots hacks
4:00
Etch-A-Selfie
» ‎ Hack a Day

Taking a selfie before the modern smartphone era was a true endeavor. Flip phones didn’t have forward-facing cameras, and if you want to go really far back to the days of film cameras, you needed to set a timer on your camera and hope, or get a physical remote shutter. You could also try and create a self portrait on an Etch a Sketch, too, but this would take a lot of time and artistic skill. Luckily in the modern world, we can bring some of this old technology into the future and add a robot to create interesting retro selfies – without needing to be an artist.

The device from [im-pro] attaches two servos to the Etch a Sketch knobs. This isn’t really a new idea in itself, but the device also includes a front-facing camera, taking advantage of particularly inexpensive ESP32 Camera modules. Combining the camera features with [Bart Dring]’s ESP32 Grbl port is a winner. Check the code in [im-pro]’s GitHub.

Once the picture is taken, the ESP32 at the heart of the build handles the image processing and then drawing the image on the Etch a Sketch. The robot needs a black and white image to draw, and an algorithm for doing it without “lifting” the drawing tool, and these tasks stretch the capabilities of such a small processor. It takes some time to work, but in the end the results speak for themselves.

The final project is definitely worth looking for, if not for the interesting ESP32-controlled robot than for the image processing algorithim implementation. The ESP32 is a truly versatile platform, though, and is useful for building almost anything.

Tags: robots hacks
July 28, 2019
7:00
A 3D-Printable Mecanum Wheeled Robot Platform
» ‎ Hack a Day

If your interest lies with robotics there are a multitude of different platforms for you to build. [Teemu Laurila] was frustrated with what was on offer, so designed his own with four-wheel double wishbone suspension and mecanum wheels for maximum flexibility.

It’s a design that has been through multiple revisions since its first iteration in 2015, and along the way it’s clear some thought has gone into it. That double wishbone suspension features an angle for a high ground clearance, and is fully sprung. Drive comes from small motor/gearboxes at each axle. The chassis meanwhile has plenty of space for a single-board computer, and has been specifically designed with the BeagleBone Black in mind.

This build isn’t fully DIY, as the mecanum wheels appear to be off-the-shelf items, but the rest of the project makes up for this. If you need to make your own, it’s hardly as though there aren’t any projects from which you can borrow components.

Tags: robots hacks
July 25, 2019
19:00
Deducing Stepper Motor Wiring
» ‎ Hack a Day

There are a lot of fun projects you can do with stepper motors salvaged from old printers or disk drives. However, it isn’t always clear how to connect to some strange motor with no markings or schematics. [Corvetteguy50] has a video showing his trick for working out the connections easily, and you can see it below.

The basic idea is simple. Using a special jig, he connects an LED across two random pins and spins the motor. If the LED lights, you’ve found a coil. You just don’t know which coil, yet. You can also short two wires and note when you feel resistance when you spin the shaft.

This gets a little trickier with some motor types, for example those that have encoder outputs which won’t do anything to drive the motor. Others have a case ground wire. Steppers have either 4, 5, 6, or 8 drive wires so if you have one more than any of those numbers it is likely a ground wire.

There are other ways to identify the pinout, especially if the motor has 4 or 6 wires. For a 4 wire motor, you can measure resistance until you find a pair that read a relatively low resistance. Then you simply have to guess which one is A and which is B. If you guess wrong, the motor will spin backward, as these are bipolar motors.

For a 6 wire device, the extra two wires are center taps and a 5 wire motor will have both center taps tied together. Measuring resistance between two wires should give you one of three readings. If you read an open circuit, you are on two different coils. If you read a resistance, you can record it and measure some more pairs. The resistance readings will cluster around two different values. The pairs with higher values are the coil ends. The remaining two wires are the center taps and you can tell which is which by which end they are connected to. Of course, in a 5 wire motor you’ll only have one wire left. Those motors can only be used in a unipolar configuration, but a 6 or 8 wire motor can be either.

If you want more information on these kinds of motors, we’ve covered them a lot over the years. Manually controlling one is pretty informative, too. There’s also the classic Jones on Stepper Motors.

Tags: robots hacks
July 18, 2019
11:30
Getting Hackers Excited about Cable Robots
» ‎ Hack a Day

Ever since he looked into them as a way to water and care for his plants, [Tom] has been fascinated with cable robots. These high-flying gadgets can move in three dimensions over huge areas, provided you’ve got the ability to string up the aforementioned cables. But despite their flexibility, there hasn’t been a whole lot of hobbyist level development with these unique systems.

With his entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, [Tom] is hoping to change that. He’s learned a lot by building his own cable robots, and now wants to take it to the next level. Ideally with collaboration from the community, if he can find other hackers looking to outfit their homes or workshops with their own miniature sky cranes.

So what can you do with a cable robot? In the video after the break, [Tom] shows one of his creations dutifully transporting beer cans across the room and stacking them into a pyramid. Admittedly this isn’t a particularly useful capability (unless you run a bar, perhaps), but it does show the speed and dexterity of the system even when crossing large distances. If you’ve ever wanted to play the home edition of “Automate the Freight”, this one’s for you.

The system uses a trio of 36 volt stepper motors powered by a homebrew SLA7078 driver that [Tom] designed himself. Each stepper turns a geared-down spindle to which a strong cable is attached. With some clever routing around the workspace, careful orchestration of these small winches can be used to move the point where all the cables meet in 3D space. All that’s left is mounting your gadget of choice to this central point, and away you go.

We’ve seen the concept used commercially, but as far as hobbyist projects go, the most activity we’ve seen in this space would have to be the various room sized 3D printers that have popped up over the years. It would be interesting to see what kind of interesting projects the community could come up with if they had something with a little more muscle.

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Tags: robots hacks
July 02, 2019
16:00
RC Trike Handles Great With Rear Steering
» ‎ Hack a Day

Small robotics builds with three wheels are plentiful. The most typical configuration is to have the two front wheels drive and turn the vehicle in a skid-steer configuration. The third wheel is often a simple caster. However, this isn’t the only way to go, and [markus.purtz] has put together a build that does things differently.

The build is a small, radio-controlled FPV trike. Instead of the usual skid-steer setup, the rear wheel is mounted on a pair of horizontal bearings which allows it to pivot left and right. A servo is used to control the rear wheel position, with a pair of tie rod ends used to connect the horn to the rear steering assembly. It’s not the only unconventional design choice, either – magnets are used to affix the top plate to the vehicle chassis, rather than screws or clips. For video, the user can mount either a small dedicated FPV camera, or a GoPro with the included mount.

Without any code or control details posted, we can’t be 100% sure how it all works. However, from the video, it appears that both front wheels are being driven at the same speed, with steering handled solely by the rear wheel. This is apparent when driving on a smooth surface, where the vehicle can be seen to slide when turning. While it’s unlikely this setup has many advantages over a simpler differential steering build with a caster, it does show that rear steering can be effective on its own.

It’s a build that shows off the benefits of using proper bearings and mechanical parts in a design. With today’s online marketplaces, it’s never been easier to find what you need. Parts are on Thingiverse for those interested in replicating the design. Meanwhile little FPV bots remain popular, and we’re sure we’ll continue to see them coming in. Video after the break.

Tags: robots hacks
June 24, 2019
11:30
A Better Motor For Chickenwalkers
» ‎ Hack a Day

The last decade or so has seen remarkable advances in motor technology for robotics and hobby applications. We’re no longer stuck with crappy brushed motors, and now we have fancy (and cheap!) stepper motors, brushless motors for drones, and servo motors. This has led to some incredible achievements; drones are only barely possible with brushed motors, and you can’t build a robot without encoders.

For his entry into the Hackaday Prize, [Gabrael Levine] is taking on one of the hardest robotics challenges around: the bipedal robot. It’s a chickenwalker, or an AT-ST; either way, you need a lot of power in a very small space, and that’s where the OpenTorque Actuator comes in. It’s a quasi-direct-drive motor that was originally pioneered by the MIT Biomimetics Lab.

The key feature of the OpenTorque Actuator is using a big brushless motor, a rotation encoder, and a small, 8:1 planetary gear set. This allows the motor to be backdrivable, capable of force-sensing and open-loop control, and because this actuator is 3D printed, it’s really cheap to produce.

But a motor without a chassis is nothing, and that’s where the Blackbird Bipedal Robot comes in. In keeping with best practices of robotic design, the kinematics are first being tested in simulation, with the mechanical build happening in parallel. That means there’s some great videos of this chickenwalker strutting around (available below), and so far, everything looks great. This bipedal robot can turn, walk, yaw, and work is continuing on the efforts to get this bird-legged bot to stand still.

Tags: robots hacks
June 20, 2019
16:00
Electric Wheelchair Makes A Great Base For A Big Robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

Wiring into the joystick is a quick and easy way to hack in custom control to a wheelchair.
Building robots can be fun, and remains a popular pastime among many in the hacker and maker set. However the hardware side of things can be daunting. This is particularly the case for those attempting to build something on a larger scale. A great shortcut is to start with a robust mechanical platform from the outset – and using an electric wheelchair is a great way to do so.

[Nikita] started this project way back in 2009, after finding a broken electric wheelchair at a flea market. It was no longer in fit condition for use as a wheelchair, so [Nikita] was able to score it for the low price of just $50. That’s a great price for a package which includes a robust chassis, wheels, motors and the required controllers to drive it all. With the platform in hand, it was time to get hacking.

Thus far, [Nikita] has gone so far as to strip the wheelchair of all extraneous parts, leaving it as a motorized carriage. Radio control has been implemented with the help of an Arduino, and a couple of “eyes” have been added to give it a little personality. It can also still be driven with the original joystick, which has been relocated on the chassis. Future plans involve adding a level of autonomy to allow the ‘bot to navigate waypoints and recognise faces, both tasks which should be significantly easier with 2019 technology. We’re eager to see where it goes next; we’ve seen great applications of wheelchair hardware before, after all. Video after the break.

Tags: robots hacks
June 15, 2019
1:00
A Robotic Whiteboard Cleaner Keeps The Board Ready To Go
» ‎ Hack a Day

Wiping a whiteboard can be a tedious chore. Nobody wants to stick around after a long meeting to clean up, and sensitive information is often left broadcast out in the open. Never fear, though – this robot is here to help.

Wipy, as the little device is known, is a robotic cleaner that scoots around to keep whiteboards clear and ready for work. With brains courtesy of an Arduino Uno, it uses an IR line-following sensor to target areas to wipe, rather then wasting time wiping areas that are already clean. It’s also fitted with a time-of-flight sensor for ranging, allowing it to avoid obstacles, or busy humans that are writing on the board.

If Wipy lacks anything, it’s probably discretion. Despite its cute emoji-like face, it’s not really capable of tact, or knowing when it’s not needed. It’s recommended to keep Wipy powered down until you’re completely finished, lest it barge in and start wiping off important calculations before you’re done.

Fundamentally, it’s a fun build, and a great way to learn how to use a variety of sensors. If you’ve done something similar, be sure to let us know on the tips line. Else, consider automating the writing side of things, too. Tongue-in-cheek infomercial after the break.

Tags: robots hacks
June 06, 2019
8:30
Dashing Diademata Delivers Second Generation ROS
» ‎ Hack a Day

A simple robot that performs line-following or obstacle avoidance can fit all of its logic inside a single Arduino sketch. But as a robot’s autonomy increases, its corresponding software gets complicated very quickly. It won’t be long before diagnostic monitoring and logging comes in handy, or the desire to encapsulate feature areas and orchestrate how they work together. This is where tools like the Robot Operating System (ROS) come in, so we don’t have to keep reinventing these same wheels. And Open Robotics just released ROS 2 Dashing Diademata for all of us to use.

ROS is an open source project that’s been underway since 2007 and updated regularly, each named after a turtle species. What makes this one worthy of extra attention? Dashing marks the first longer term support (LTS) release of ROS 2, a refreshed second generation of ROS. All high level concepts stayed the same, meaning almost everything in our ROS orientation guide is still applicable in ROS 2. But there were big changes under the hood reflecting technical advances over the past decade.

ROS was built in an age where a Unix workstation cost thousands of dollars, XML was going to be how we communicate all data online, and an autonomous robot cost more than a high-end luxury car. Now we have $35 Raspberry Pi running Linux, XML has fallen out of favor due to processing overhead, and some autonomous robots are high-end luxury cars. For these and many other reasons, the people of Open Robotics decided it was time to make a clean break from legacy code.

The break has its detractors, as it meant leaving behind the vast library of freely available robot intelligence modules released by researchers over the years. Popular ones were (or will be) ported to ROS 2, and there is a translation bridge sufficient to work with some, but the rest will be left behind. However, this update also resolved many of the deal-breakers preventing adoption outside of research, making ROS more attractive for commercial investment which should bring more robots mainstream.

Judging by responses to the release announcement, there are plenty of people eager to put ROS 2 to work, but it is not the only freshly baked robotics framework around. We just saw Nvidia release their Isaac Robot Engine tailored to make the most of their Jetson hardware.

Tags: robots hacks
June 01, 2019
19:00
Nvidia Jetson Robots Get A Head Start With Isaac Software Tools
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We live in an exciting time of machine intelligence. Over the past few months, several products have been launched offering neural network processors at a price within hobbyist reach. But as exciting as the hardware might be, they still need software to be useful. Nvidia was not content to rest on their impressive Jetson hardware and has created a software framework to accelerate building robots around them. Anyone willing to create a Nvidia developer account may now play with the Isaac Robot Engine framework.

Isaac initially launched about a year ago as part of a bundle with Jetson Xavier hardware. But the $1,299 developer kit price tag pushed it out of reach for many of us. Now we can buy a Jetson Nano for about a hundred bucks. For those familiar with Robot Operating System (ROS), Isaac will look very familiar. They both aim to make robotic software as easy as connecting common modules together. Many of these modules called GEMS in Isaac were tailored to the strengths of Nvidia Jetson hardware. In addition to those modules and ways for them to work together, Isaac also includes a simulator for testing robot code in a virtual world similar to Gazebo for ROS.

While Isaac can run on any robot with an Nvidia Jetson brain, there are two reference robot designs. Carter is the more expensive and powerful commercially built machine rolling on Segway motors, LIDAR environmental sensors, and a Jetson Xavier. More interesting to us is the Kaya (pictured), a 3D-printed DIY robot rolling on Dynamixel serial bus servos. Kaya senses the environment with an Intel RealSense D435 depth camera and has Jetson Nano for a brain. Taken together the hardware and software offerings are a capable and functional package for exploring intelligent autonomous robots.

It is somewhat disappointing Nvidia decided to create their own proprietary software framework reinventing many wheels, instead of contributing to ROS. While there are some very appealing features like WebSight (a browser-based inspect and debug tool) at first glance Isaac doesn’t seem fundamentally different from ROS. The open source community has already started creating ROS nodes for Jetson hardware, but people who work exclusively in the Nvidia ecosystem or face a time-to-market deadline would appreciate having the option of a pre-packaged solution like Isaac.

Tags: robots hacks
1:00
Paper Strandbeest Is Strong Enough To Walk
» ‎ Hack a Day

Most readers will be familiar with the work of the Dutch artist Theo Jansen, whose Strandbeest wind-powered mechanical walking sculptures prowl the beaches of the Netherlands. The Jansen linkage provides a method of making machines with a curious but efficient walking gait from a rotational input, and has been enthusiastically copied on everything from desktop toys to bicycles.

One might think that a Jansen linkage would be beyond some materials, and you might be surprised to see a paper one. Step forward [Luis Craft] then, with a paper walking Strandbeest. Designed in Blender, cut on a desktop CNC paper cutter, and driven by a pair of small robots linked to an Arduino and controlled by a Bluetooth link, it has four sets of legs and can push around desktop items. We wouldn’t have thought it possible, but there it is.

He claims that it’s an origami Strandbeest, but we’re not so sure. We’re not papercraft experts here at Hackaday, but when we put on our pedantic hat, we insist that origami must be made of folded paper in the Japanese style rather than the cut-and-glue used here. This doesn’t detract from the quality of the work though, as you can see in the video below.

We think this is the first paper Strandbeest we’ve seen, but we’ve brought you countless others over the years. Here’s [Jansen]’s latest, wave-like take on the idea.

Tags: robots hacks
May 29, 2019
4:00
Robotic Cheetah Teaches a Motors Class
» ‎ Hack a Day

It seems like modern roboticists have decided to have a competition to see which group can develop the most terrifying robot ever invented. As of this writing the leading candidate seems to be the robot that can fuel itself by “eating” organic matter. We can only hope that the engineers involved will decide not to flesh that one out completely. Anyway, if we can get past the horrifying and/or uncanny valley-type situations we find ourselves in when looking at these robots, it turns out they have a lot to teach us about the theories behind a lot of complicated electric motors.

This research paper (gigantic PDF warning) focuses on the construction methods behind MIT’s cheetah robot. It has twelve degrees of freedom and uses a number of exceptionally low-cost modular actuators as motors to control its four legs. Compared to other robots of this type, this helps them jump a major hurdle of cost while still retaining an impressive amount of mobility and control. They were able to integrate a brushless motor, a smart ESC system with feedback, and a planetary gearbox all into the motor itself. That alone is worth the price of admission!

The details on how they did it are well-documented in the 102-page academic document and the source code is available on GitHub if you need a motor like this for any other sort of project, but if you’re here just for the cheetah doing backflips you can also keep up with the build progress at the project’s blog page. We also featured this build earlier in its history as well.

Tags: robots hacks
May 25, 2019
19:00
Humanizing Industrial Robots By Sticking A Jibo On Top
» ‎ Hack a Day

A great many robots exist in our modern world, and the vast majority of them are highly specialized machines. They do a job, and they do it well, but they don’t have much of a personality. [Guilherme Martins] was working on a fun project to build a robot arm that could create chocolate artworks, but it needed something to humanize it a bit more. Thankfully, Jibo was there to lend a hand.

For the uninitiated, Jibo was a companion robot produced by a startup company that later folded. Relying on the cloud meant that when the money ran out and the servers switched off, Jibo was essentially dead. [Guilherme] managed to salvage one of these units, however, and gave it a new life.

With the dead company unable to provide an SDK, the entire brains of the robot were replaced with a LattePanda, which is a Windows 10 single-board computer with an integrated Arduino microcontroller. This was combined with a series of Phidgets motor drivers to control all of Jibo’s joints, and with some Unity software to provide the charming expressions on the original screen.

With the Jibo body mounted upon the robot arm, a simple chocolate-decorating robot now has a personality. The robot can wave to humans, and emote as it goes about its day. It’s an interesting feature to add to a project, and one that certainly makes it more fun. We’ve seen projects tackle similar subject matter before, attempting to build friendly robot pets as companions. Video after the break.

Tags: robots hacks
13:00
Little Lamp To Learn Longer Leaps
» ‎ Hack a Day

Reinforcement learning is a subset of machine learning where the machine is scored on their performance (“evaluation function”). Over the course of a training session, behavior that improved final score is positively reinforced gradually building towards an optimal solution. [Dheera Venkatraman] thought it would be fun to use reinforcement learning for making a little robot lamp move. But before that can happen, he had to build the hardware and prove its basic functionality with a manual test script.

Inspired by the hopping logo of Pixar Animation Studios, this particular form of locomotion has a few counterparts in the natural world. But hoppers of the natural world don’t take the shape of a Luxo lamp, making this project an interesting challenge. [Dheera] published all of his OpenSCAD files for this 3D-printed lamp so others could join in the fun. Inside the lamp head is a LED ring to illuminate where we expect a light bulb, while also leaving room in the center for a camera. Mechanical articulation servos are driven by a PCA9685 I2C PWM driver board, and he has written and released code to interface such boards with Robot Operating System (ROS) orchestrating our lamp’s features. This completes the underlying hardware components and associated software foundations for this robot lamp.

Once all the parts have been printed, electronics wired, and everything assembled, [Dheera] hacked together a simple “Hello World” script to verify his mechanical design is good enough to get started. The video embedded after the break was taken at OSH Park’s Bring-A-Hack afterparty to Maker Faire Bay Area 2019. This motion sequence was frantically hand-coded in 15 minutes, but these tentative baby hops will serve as a great baseline. Future hopping performance of control algorithms trained by reinforcement learning will show how far this lamp has grown from this humble “Hello World” hop.

[Dheera] had previously created the shadow clock and is no stranger to ROS, having created the ROS topic text visualization tool for debugging. We will be watching to see how robot Luxo will evolve, hopefully it doesn’t find a way to cheat! Want to play with reinforcement learning, but prefer wheeled robots? Here are a few options.

Tags: robots hacks
10:00
One-Legged Robot Does the Hop
» ‎ Hack a Day

At first, we thought this robot was like a rabbit until we realized rabbits have a 300% bonus in the leg department. SALTO — a robot from [Justin Yim], [Eric Wang], and [Ronald Fearing] only has one leg but gets around quite well hopping from place to place. If you can’t picture it, the video below will make it very obvious.

According to the paper about SALTO, existing hopping robots require external sensors and often are tethered. SALTO is self-contained. The robot weighs a tenth of a kilogram and takes its name from the word saltatorial (adapted for leaping ) which itself comes from the Latin saltare which means to jump or leap.

The robot considers itself in four distinct modes: stance is when it is standing on the ground, liftoff is when it is launching itself, flight is in the air, and touchdown is when it reconnects with the ground. Balancing the robot during stance is old hat, of course. But upon liftoff, the robot computes an error term for the velocity and uses that to compute a correction value. The robot has a tail and two small propellers to control its attitude.

At the start, the robot balances on three points: its toe, its rear ankle, and one end of its tail. Using gyros, it is able to set initial values. It then stands up in different poses and uses the thrusters to zero out any roll and pitch.

We were not far into the video before we wondered if the beastie could climb stairs. It can’t. According to the authors say that estimate errors mean the foot can move up to a half meter away from where you wanted it to land. However, they believe future versions will have improved estimation that would let it climb stairs, leap over furniture or other obstacles, and handle a variety of terrain. We only hope they print the poor thing a kangaroo body.

Jumping robot always brings back our nightmares of Atlas breaking down our bedroom door. He has no problem with stairs. We’ve also seen a prototype lunar rover that can jump over things, even though that’s not its primary mode of locomotion.

Tags: robots hacks
May 21, 2019
11:30
Bringing Battle Bots into the Modern Classroom
» ‎ Hack a Day

With the wide array of digital entertainment that’s available to young students, it can be difficult for educators to capture their imagination. In decades past, a “volcano” made with baking soda and vinegar would’ve been enough to put a class of 5th graders on the edge of their seats, but those projects don’t pack quite the same punch on students who may have prefaced their school day with a battle royale match. Today’s educators are tasked with inspiring kids who already have the world at their fingertips.

Hoping to rise to that challenge with her entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, [Misty Lackie] is putting together a kit which would allow elementary and middle school students to build their very own fighting robots. Thanks to the use of modular components, younger students don’t have to get bogged down with soldering or the intricacies of how all the hardware actually works. On the other hand, older kids will be able to extend the basic platform without having to start from scratch.

The electronics for the bot consist primarily of an Arduino Uno with Sensor Shield, a dual H-bridge motor controller, and a wireless receiver for a PS2 controller. This allows the students to control the bot’s dual drive motors with an input scheme that’s likely very familiar to them already. By mapping the controller’s face buttons to digital pins on the Arduino, additional functions such as the spinner seen in the bot after the break, easily be activated.

[Misty] has already done some test runs with an early version of the kit, and so far its been a huge success. Students were free to design their own bodies and add-ons for the remote controlled platform, and it’s fascinating to see how unique the final results turned out to be. We’ve seen in the past how excited students can be when tasked with customizing their own robots, so any entry into that field is a positive development in our book.

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Tags: robots hacks
May 14, 2019
19:00
The Kalman Filter Exposed
» ‎ Hack a Day

If we are hiring someone such as a carpenter or an auto mechanic, we always look for two things: what kind of tools they have and what they do when things go wrong. For many types of embedded systems, one important tool that serious developers use is the Kalman filter. It is also something you use when things go “wrong.” [Carcano] recently posted a tutorial on Kalman filter equations that tries to demystify the topic. His example — a case of things going wrong — is when you have a robot that knows how far it is supposed to move and also has GPS coordinates of its positions. Since the positions probably don’t agree, you can consider that a problem with the system.

The obvious answer is to average the two positions. That’s fine if the error is small. But a Kalman filter is much more robust in more situations. [Carcano] does a good job of taking you through the math, but we will warn you it is plenty of math. If you don’t know what a Gaussian distribution is or the word covariance makes you think of sailboats, you are going to have to do some reading to get through the post.

Perhaps the most fun implementation we’ve ever seen is [Richard’s] interactive Kalman filter simulation. You can set all the parameters (including random noise) and the web page will predict where your mouse cursor is as you move it. The purple dots are noisy input and the green dots are where the page thinks your mouse is. Or if you prefer videos, there is a series of seven videos from MATLAB about Kalman filters and you can see the first one, below.

This isn’t the first time we’ve looked at a walkthrough of the equations, but it has been awhile. Kalman filters show up in surprising places, like this camera autofocus mechanism.

Tags: robots hacks
May 12, 2019
22:01
Nvidia Teaching Robots To Master IKEA Kitchens
» ‎ Hack a Day

The current wave of excitement around machine learning kicked off when graphics processors were repurposed to make training deep neural networks practical. Nvidia found themselves the engine of a new revolution and seized their opportunity to help push frontiers of research. Their research lab in Seattle will focus on one such field: making robots smart enough to work alongside humans in an IKEA kitchen.

Today’s robots are mostly industrial machines that require workspaces designed for robots. They run day and night, performing repetitive tasks, usually inside cages to keep squishy humans out of harm’s way. Robots will need to be a lot smarter about their surroundings before we could safely dismantle those cages. While there are some industrial robots making a start in this arena, they have a hard time justifying their price premium. (Example: financial difficulty of Rethink Robotics, who made the Baxter and Sawyer robots.)

So there’s a lot of room for improvement in this field, and this evolution will need a training environment offering tasks of varying difficulty levels for robots. Anywhere from the rigorous structured environment where robots work well today, to a dynamic unstructured environment where robots are hopelessly lost. Lab lead Dr. Dieter Fox explained how a kitchen is ideal. A meticulously cleaned and organized kitchen is very similar to an industrial setting. From there, we can gradually make a kitchen more challenging for a robot. For example: today’s robots can easily pick up a can with its rigid regular shape, but what about a half-full bag of flour? And from there, learn to pick up a piece of fresh fruit without bruising it. These tasks share challenges with many other tasks outside of a kitchen.

This isn’t about building a must-have home cooking robot, it’s about working through the range of challenges shared with common kitchen tasks. The lab has a lot of neat hardware, but its success will be measured by the software, and like all research, published results should be reproducible by other labs. You don’t have a high-end robotics lab in your house, but you do have a kitchen. That’s why it’s not just any kitchen, but an IKEA kitchen, to take advantage of the fact they are standardized, affordable, and available around the world for other robot researchers to benchmark against.

Most of us can experiment in a kitchen, IKEA or not. We have access to all the other tools we need: affordable AI hardware from Google, from Beaglebone, and from Nvidia. And we certainly have no shortage of robot arms and manipulators on these pages, ranging from a small laser-cut MeArm to our 2018 Hackaday Prize winner Dexter.

Tags: robots hacks
13:01
Robot Hummingbird Imitates Nature
» ‎ Hack a Day

Purdue’s Bio-Robotics lab has been working on a robotic hummingbird and, as you can see in the videos below, have had a lot of success. What’s more, is they’ve shared that success on GitHub. If you want to make a flapping-winged robot, this is definitely where you start.

If you’ve ever watched a hummingbird, you know their flight capability is nothing short of spectacular. The Purdue robot flies in a similar fashion (although on a tether to get both power and control information) and relies on each wing having its own motor. The motors not only propel the wings but also act as sensors. For example, they can detect if a wing is damaged, has made contact with something, or has changed performance due to atmospheric conditions.

In addition to the tethered control system, the hummingbird requires a motion capture sensor external to itself and some machine learning. Researchers note that there is sufficient payload capacity to put batteries onboard and they would also need additional sensors to accomplish totally free flight. It is amazing when you realize that a real hummingbird manages all this with a little bitty brain.

The published code is in Python and is part of three presentations later this month at a technical conference (the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation). If you don’t want to wait on the paper, there’s a post on IEEE Spectrum about the robotic beast, available now and that article contains preprint versions of the papers. The Python code does require a bit to run, so expect a significant flight computer.

The last hummingbird bot we saw was a spy. We’ve also seen robots that were like bees — sort of.

Tags: robots hacks
April 24, 2019
1:00
Self-aware Robotic Arm
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you ever tried to program a robotic arm or almost any robotic mechanism that has more than 3 degrees of freedom, you know that a big part of the programming goes to the programming of the movements themselves. What if you built a robot, regardless of how you connect the motors and joints and, with no knowledge of itself, the robot becomes aware of the way it is physically built?

That is what Columbia Engineering researchers have made by creating a robot arm that learns how it is connected, with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. At first, the robot has no idea what its shape is, how its motors work and how they affect its movement. After one day of trying out its own outputs in a pretty much random fashion and getting feedback of its actions, the robot creates an accurate internal self-simulation of itself using deep-learning techniques.

The robotic arm used in this study by Lipson and his PhD student Robert Kwiatkowski is a four-degree-of-freedom articulated robotic arm. The first self-models were inaccurate as the robot did not know how its joints were connected. After about 35 hours of training, the self-model became consistent with the physical robot to within four centimeters. The self-model then performed a pick-and-place task that enabled the robot to recalibrate its original position between each step along the trajectory based entirely on the internal self-model.

To test whether the self-model could detect damage to itself, the researchers 3D-printed a deformed part to simulate damage and the robot was able to detect the change and re-train its self-model. The new self-model enabled the robot to resume its pick-and-place tasks with little loss of performance.

Since the internal representation is not static, not only this helps the robot to improve its performance over time but also allows it to adapt to damage and changes in its own structure. This could help robots to continue to function more reliably when there its part start to wear off or, for example, when replacement parts are not exactly the same format or shape.

Of course, it will be long before this arm can get a precision anywhere near Dexter, the 2018 Hackaday Prize winner, but it is still pretty cool to see the video of this research:

Tags: robots hacks
April 03, 2019
13:00
Developing The Ultimate Open Source Radio Control Transmitter
» ‎ Hack a Day

While we’ve come a long way in terms of opening up the world of radio control to open source software, a good deal of the hardware itself is still closed up. You can flash a cheap RC transmitter with a community developed firmware, in fact there’s a decent chance that’s …read more

Tags: robots hacks
March 30, 2019
10:00
A Pet Robot, Just Like Boston Dynamics Makes
» ‎ Hack a Day

Every few months or so, a new video from Boston Dynamics will make the rounds on the Internet. This is their advertising, because unless the military starts buying mechanical mules, Boston Dynamics is going to be out of business pretty soon. You’ll see robots being kicked down the stairs, robots …read more

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March 25, 2019
13:00
This Force Controlled Robot Gripper Is Less Likely To Break Stuff
» ‎ Hack a Day

While robotic arms can handle a wide variety of tasks, the specific job at hand will have a major influence on the type of end effector used. For sorting ferromagnetic parts an electromagnet might be enough, while for more accurate location a mechanical gripper could be employed. If you’re working …read more

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March 22, 2019
13:00
Kid Rover Is Six Wheels Of Awesome
» ‎ Hack a Day

There are plenty of ways to go about learning to TIG weld. Most involve a series of practice parts making butt joints and welding together various sections of pipe. [Kris Temmerman] decided to go a little bit farther, however. The result is a kid rover that’s sure to be the …read more

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8:30
Robot Telephone Operator Handles Social Media For You
» ‎ Hack a Day

Social media has become pervasive in modern life. It can be impossible to get so much as an invite to a party without offering up your personal data at the altar of the various tech companies. [David] wanted to avoid the pressures of seeing countless photos of people climbing mountains …read more

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March 18, 2019
4:00
Origami Gripper Is Great For Soft And Heavy Objects
» ‎ Hack a Day

Robotic arms are fascinating devices, capable of immense speed and precision when carrying out their tasks. They’re also capable of carrying great loads, and a full-sized industrial robot in operation at maximum pace is a sight to behold. However, while it’s simple to design grippers to move strong metal objects, …read more

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March 16, 2019
10:00
Tweetbot Expresses Twitter Emotions
» ‎ Hack a Day

When reading textual communications, it can be difficult to accurately acertain emotional intent. Individual humans can be better or worse at this, with sometimes hilarious results when it goes wrong. Regardless, there’s nothing a human can do that a machine won’t eventually do better. For just this purpose, Tweetbot is …read more

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March 08, 2019
4:00
Uncertain Future of Orphaned Jibo Robots Presents Opportunities
» ‎ Hack a Day

In our modern connected age, our devices have become far more powerful and useful when they could draw upon resources of a global data network. The downside of a cloud-connected device is the risk of being over-reliant on computers outside of our own control. The people who brought a Jibo …read more

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February 27, 2019
16:00
Flexible PCB Robot Flops Around To Get Around
» ‎ Hack a Day

In his continuing quest to reduce the parts count of a robot as far as possible, [Carl Bugeja] has hit upon an unusual design: robots built of almost nothing but PCBs.

Admittedly, calling these floppy four-legged critters robots is still a bit of a stretch at this point. The video …read more

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February 19, 2019
16:00
Sphero RVR’s Quest For A Niche In Introductory Robotics
» ‎ Hack a Day

Thanks to internet commerce opening up a global marketplace, it is now easier than ever for a budding roboticist to get started. There are so many robot kits available, across such a wide range of price and sophistication, that deciding which one to buy becomes a challenging project in itself. …read more

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January 25, 2019
1:00
Robot Can’t Take Its Eyes Off The Bottle
» ‎ Hack a Day

Robots, as we currently understand them, tend to run on electricity. Only in the fantastical world of Futurama do robots seek out alcohol as both a source of fuel and recreation. That is, until [Les Wright] and his beer seeking robot came along. (YouTube, video after the break.)

A Raspberry Pi 3 provides the brains, with an Intel Neural Compute stick plugged in as an accelerator for neural network tasks. This hardware, combined with the OpenCV image detection software, enable the tracked robot to identify objects and track their position accordingly.

That a beer bottle was chosen is merely an …read more

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January 12, 2019
1:00
Robot’s Actions and Our Reactions
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you walk into a dog owner’s home that dog is probably going to make a beeline to see if you are a threat. If you walk into a cat owner’s home, you may see the cat wandering around, if it even chooses to grace you with its presence. For some people, a dog’s direct approach can be nerve-wracking, or even scary depending on their history and relative size of the dog. Still, these domestic animals are easy to empathize with especially if you or your family have a pet. They have faces which can convey curiosity or smug indifference …read more

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January 11, 2019
8:00
Robot Arm is a Fast Learner
» ‎ Hack a Day

Not long ago, machines grew their skills when programmers put their noses to the grindstone and mercilessly attacked those 104 keys. Machine learning is turning some of that around by replacing the typing with humans demonstrating the actions they want the robot to perform. Suddenly, a factory line-worker can be a robot trainer. This is not new, but a robot needs thousands of examples before it is ready to make an attempt. A new paper from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are adding the ability to infer so robots can perform after witnessing a task just one time. …read more

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January 05, 2019
4:00
Control Anything With A Chat Bot
» ‎ Hack a Day

In the world of Internet of Things, it’s easy enough to get something connected to the Internet. But what should you use to communicate with and control it? There are many standards and tools available, but the best choice is always to use the tools you have on hand. [Victor] found himself in this situation, and found that the best way to control an Internet-connected car was to use the Flask server he already had.

The remote controlled car was originally supposed to come with an Arduino, but the microcontroller was missing upon arrival. He had a Raspberry Pi around, …read more

Tags: robots hacks
December 28, 2018
22:00
Can This Fire Fighting Robot Take The Heat?
» ‎ Hack a Day

Firefighting is a difficult and dangerous job, which puts humans on the front line to save life and property on a regular basis. It’s a prime candidate for some robot helpers, and [Ivan] has stepped in with a fun build that, while it won’t be serving in your municipal department any time soon, gets us thinking about the possibilities.

It’s a radio controlled robot with an Arduino Uno for the brains. A couple of motor driver boards are used to run four windscreen wiper motors for propulsion. Long before the days of online shopping, the wiper motor was a hacker …read more

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13:00
Dainty Delta Is About As Small As A Robot Can Be
» ‎ Hack a Day

There’s something mesmerizing about delta robots. Whether they are used at a stately pace for a 3D-printer or going so fast you can barely see them move in a pick and place machine, the way that three rotary actuators can work together to produce motion in three axes is always a treat to watch. Especially with a delta robot as small as this one.

[KarelK16] says this is one of those “just because I can” projects with no real application. And he appears to have been working on it for a while; the video below is from eight years ago. …read more

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December 26, 2018
1:01
Kinetic Wire Animatronics Bend It Like Disney
» ‎ Hack a Day

The House of Mouse has been at the forefront of entertainment technology from its very beginnings in an old orange grove in Anaheim. Disney Imagineers invented the first modern animatronics in the 1960s and they’ve been improving the technology ever since, often to the point of being creepy.

But the complicated guts of an animatronic are sometimes too much for smaller characters, so in the spirit of “cheaper, faster, better”, Disney has developed some interesting techniques for animated characters made from wire. Anyone who has ever played with a [Gumby] or other posable wireframe toys knows that eventually, the wire …read more

Tags: robots hacks
December 20, 2018
7:01
Rise Of The Unionized Robots
» ‎ Hack a Day

For the first time, a robot has been unionized. This shouldn’t be too surprising as a European Union resolution has already recommended creating a legal status for robots for purposes of liability and a robot has already been made a citizen of one country. Naturally, these have been done either to stimulate discussion before reality catches up or as publicity stunts.

What would reality have to look like before a robot should be given legal status similar to that of a human? For that, we can look to fiction.

Tony Stark, the fictional lead character in the Iron Man movies, …read more

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December 19, 2018
8:30
Hexagrow Robot Packs A Serious Sensor Package
» ‎ Hack a Day

Automation is a lofty goal in many industries, but not always straightforward to execute. Welding car bodies in the controlled environment of a production line is relatively straightforward. Maintaining plants in a greenhouse, however, brings certain complexities due to the unpredictable organic processes at play. Hexagrow is a robot that aims to study automation in this area, developed as the final year project of [Mithira Udugama] and team.

The robot’s chassis is a very modern build, consisting of carbon fiber panels and 3D printed components. This kind of strength is perhaps overkill for the application, but it makes for a …read more

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December 18, 2018
19:00
This Robot Swims, Skates, And Crawls
» ‎ Hack a Day

You often hear that art imitates life, but sometimes technology does too. Pliant Energy Systems’ Velox robot resembles an underwater creature more than it does a robot because it uses undulating fins to propel itself, as you can see in the video below.

The video shows the beast skating, but also swimming, and walking. It really does look more like a lifeform than a device. According to the company, the robot has excellent static thrust/watt and is resistant to becoming entangled in plants and other debris.

The downside of this report is that it is sparse on technical detail. However, …read more

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December 17, 2018
16:00
Welcome Our New Insect Overlords With Arduino-Powered Ant Bot
» ‎ Hack a Day

Walking robots come in many forms, and each presents their own unique challenges. Bipedal style locomotion is considered particularly difficult to do well, however designs with more legs offer certain advantages. Hexapods offer the possibility of keeping several legs on the ground while others move, providing a useful degree of stability. [How To Mechatronics] developed this ant robot, which is an excellent example of the form.

The hexapod has as the name suggests, six legs, each of which consist of 3 joints. This necessitates 3 servos per leg, for 18 servos total just for locomotion. Further servos are then used …read more

Tags: robots hacks
December 12, 2018
11:30
Soft Rotating Pneumatic Actuators
» ‎ Hack a Day

When we think of pneumatic actuators, we typically consider the standard varieties of pneumatic cylinder, capable of linear motion. These can be referred to as “hard” actuators, made of rigid components and capable of great accuracy and force delivery. However, “soft” actuators have their own complementary abilities – such as being able to handle more delicate tasks and being less likely to injure human operators when used in collaborative operations. The Whitesides Research Group at Harvard University has undertaken significant research in this field, and released a paper covering a novel type of soft pneumatic actuator.

The actuator consists of …read more

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November 30, 2018
1:00
Buy Or Build An Autonomous Race Car To Take The Checkered Flag
» ‎ Hack a Day

Putting autonomous vehicles on public roads takes major resources beyond most of our means. But we can explore all the same general concepts at a smaller scale by modifying remote-control toy cars, limited only by our individual budgets and skill levels. For those of us whose interest and expertise lie in software, Amazon Web Services just launched AWS DeepRacer: a complete package for exploring machine learning on autonomous vehicles.

At a hardware level, the spec sheet makes it sound like they’ve bolted their AWS DeepLens machine vision computer on an 1/18th scale monster truck chassis. But the hardware is only …read more

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November 24, 2018
19:00
I’m Sorry, Alexander, I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That
» ‎ Hack a Day

Getting people to space is extremely difficult, and while getting robots to space is still pretty challenging, it’s much easier. For that reason, robots and probes have been helping us explore the solar system for decades. Now, though, a robot assistant is on board the ISS to work with the astronauts, and rather than something impersonal like a robot arm, this one has a face, can navigate throughout the ship, and can respond to voice inputs.

The robot is known as CIMON, the Crew Interactive Mobile Companion. Built by Airbus, this interactive helper will fly with German astronaut Alexander Gerst …read more

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November 23, 2018
13:01
Move Over Strandbeest, Here’s Strider!
» ‎ Hack a Day

Father-and-son team [Wade] and [Ben Wagle] have developed and extensively tested two great walker designs: TrotBot and the brand-new Strider. But that’s not enough: their website details all of their hard-earned practical experience in simulating and building these critters, on scales ranging from LEGO-Technic to garage-filling (YouTube, embedded below). Their Walker ABC’s page alone is full of tremendously deep insight into the problem, and is a must-read.

These mechanisms were designed to be simpler than the Jansen linkage and smoother than the Klann. In particular, when they’re not taking a stroll down a beach, walker feet often need to clear …read more

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November 16, 2018
1:00
Smooth Moves from Cheap Motors
» ‎ Hack a Day

Building an electric motor isn’t hard or technically challenging, but these motors have very little in the way of control. A stepper motor is usually employed in applications that need precision, but adding this feature to a motor adds complexity and therefore cost. There is a small $3 stepper motor available, but the downside to this motor is that it’s not exactly the Cadillac of motors, nor was it intended to be. With some coaxing, though, [T-Kuhn] was able to get a lot out of this small, cheap motor.

To test out the motors, [T-Kuhn] built a small robotic arm. …read more

Tags: robots hacks
November 06, 2018
1:00
Welding Robot Takes on a Hot, Dirty, Dangerous Job
» ‎ Hack a Day

They used to say that robots would take over the jobs too dirty or dangerous for humans. That is exactly what [Joel Sullivan] had in mind when he created this welding robot. [Joel] designed the robot for the OSB industry. No, that’s not a new operating system, it’s short for Oriented Strand Board. An engineered lumber, OSB is made of strands (or chips) of wood. It’s similar to plywood but doesn’t require large thin sheets of lumber. To make a panel of OSB, a 5-inch thick matt of wood chips is mixed with glue and compressed down to 5/16″ at …read more

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November 02, 2018
1:00
SMORES Robot Finds Its Own Way To The Campfire
» ‎ Hack a Day

Robots that can dynamically reconfigure themselves to adapt to their environments offer a promising advantage over their less dynamic cousins. Researchers have been working through all the challenges of realizing that potential: hardware, software, and all the interactions in between. On the software end of the spectrum, a team at University of Pennsylvania’s ModLab has been working on a robot that can autonomously choose a configuration to best fit its task at hand.

We’ve recently done an overview of modular robots, and we noted that coordination and control are persistent challenges in this area. The robot in this particular demonstration …read more

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October 22, 2018
1:00
Teardown: Sony’s New Aibo goes Under the Knife
» ‎ Hack a Day

In a complete surprise, Sony has moved to release the latest version of their robotic dog series, Aibo, in North America. The device is already out in Japan, where there are a number of owner’s clubs that would rival any dedicated kennel club. Thanks to the [Robot Start] team, we now have a glimpse of what goes into making the robotic equivalent of man’s best friend in their teardown of an Aibo ERS-1000.

According to Yoshihiro of Robot Start, Aibo looks to be using a proprietary battery reminiscent of the Handycam camcorders. Those three gold contacts are used for charging …read more

Tags: robots hacks
October 18, 2018
11:30
Laser Cut Cardboard Robot Construction Kit Eases Learning And Play
» ‎ Hack a Day

It has never been easier to put a microcontroller and other electronics into a simple project, and that has tremendous learning potential. But when it comes to mechanical build elements like enclosures, frames, and connectors, things haven’t quite kept the same pace. It’s easier to source economical servos, motors, and microcontroller boards than it is to arrange for other robot parts that allow for cheap and accessible customization and experimentation.

That’s where [Andy Forest] comes in with the Laser Cut Cardboard Robot Construction Kit, which started at STEAMLabs, a non-profit community makerspace in Toronto. The design makes modular frames, enclosures, …read more

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8:01
Mechatronic Hand Mimics Human Anatomy to Achieve Dexterity
» ‎ Hack a Day

Behold the wondrous complexity of the human hand. Twenty-seven bones working in concert with muscles, tendons, and ligaments extending up the forearm to produce a range of motions that gave us everything from stone tools to symphonies. Our hands are what we use to interface with the physical world on a fine level, and it’s understandable that we’d want mechanical versions of ourselves to include hands that were similarly dexterous.

That’s a tall order to fill, but this biomimetic mechatronic hand is a pretty impressive step in that direction. It’s [Will Cogley]’s third-year university design project, which he summarizes in …read more

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October 13, 2018
4:00
Atlas is Back with Some New Moves
» ‎ Hack a Day

Atlas is back, and this time he’s got some sweet parkour moves to show off. Every few months, Boston Dynamics gives us a tantalizing glimpse into their robotics development labs. They must be doing something right, as these videos never fail both to amaze and scare us. This time Atlas, Boston Dynamics humanoid bipedal robot, is doing a bit of light parkour — jumping over a log and from box to box. The Atlas we’re seeing here is the evolution of the same robot we saw at the DARPA Robotics Challenge back in 2013.

The video caption mentions that Atlas …read more

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October 10, 2018
19:00
The Little Cat That Could
» ‎ Hack a Day

Most humans take a year to learn their first steps, and they are notoriously clumsy. [Hartvik Line] taught a robotic cat to walk [YouTube link] in less time, but this cat had a couple advantages over a pre-toddler. The first advantage was that it had four legs, while the second came from a machine learning technique called genetic algorithms that surpassed human fine-tuning in two hours. That’s a pretty good benchmark.

The robot itself is an impressive piece inspired by robots at EPFL, a research institute in Switzerland. All that Swiss engineering is not easy for one person to program, …read more

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October 09, 2018
22:00
One-Legged Jumping Robot Shows That Control Is Everything
» ‎ Hack a Day

Robots that can jump have been seen before, but a robot that jumps all the time is a little different. Salto-1P is a one-legged jumping robot at UC Berkeley, and back in 2017 it demonstrated the ability to hop continuously with enough control to keep itself balanced. Since then it has been taught some new tricks; having moved beyond basic stability it can now jump around and upon things with an impressive degree of control.

Key to doing this is the ability to plant its single foot exactly where it wants, which allows for more complex behaviors such as hopping …read more

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October 07, 2018
4:00
Robot Sorts Beads by Color
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you know anyone who does crafts, they probably have a drawer with a few million beads loose and mixed together. You’ll sort them out one day, right? Probably not. Unless, of course, you build a robot to do the dirty work for you. That’s what [Kalfalfa] did, using some Phidgets boards, a camera and Open CV. You can see a video of the cardboard machine doing its thing below.

Maybe it is because we are more electronics-minded, but we were impressed with the mechanism to grab just one bead at a time from the hopper. If you watch the …read more

Tags: robots hacks
October 06, 2018
7:00
Soft Robotic Jellyfish Get Pumped in the Atlantic
» ‎ Hack a Day

In a recent paper in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, researchers at Florida Atlantic University describe the process of building and testing five free-swimming soft robotic jellyfish. The paper contains build details and data on how three different variables – tentacle stiffness, stroke frequency, and stroke amplitude – affect the swimming characteristics of each bot. For a more in-depth build log, we found the original masters thesis by Jennifer Frame to be very thorough, including processes, schematics, parts lists, and even some Arduino code.

Though a landlubber may say the robots look more like a stumpy octopus than a jellyfish, according …read more

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October 03, 2018
4:00
Giant Robot Arm Uses Fluid Power, Not Electronics
» ‎ Hack a Day

Fair warning that [Freerk Wieringa]’s videos documenting his giant non-electric robot build are long. We’ve only watched the first two episodes and the latest installment so far, all of which are posted after the break. Consider it an investment to watch a metalworking artist undertake an incredible build.

The first video starts with the construction of the upper arm of the robot. Everything is fabricated using simple tools; the most sophisticated tools are a lathe and a TIG welder. As the arm build proceeds we see that there are no electronic controls to be found. Control is through hydraulic cylinders …read more

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October 02, 2018
11:30
An Unmanned Ground Vehicle, Compatable With An Arduino
» ‎ Hack a Day

Building your own robot is something everyone should do, and [Ahmed] has already built a few robots designed to be driven around indoors. An indoor robot is easy, though: you have flat surfaces to roll around on, and the worst-case scenario you have a staircase to worry about. An outdoor robot is something else entirely, which makes this project so spectacular. It’s the M1 Rover, an unmanned ground vehicle, built around the Arduino platform.

The design goal of the M1 Rover isn’t just to be a remote-controlled car that can be driven around indoors. This robot is meant for rough …read more

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October 01, 2018
11:30
The Leap Motion Makes Robots Bend To Your Will
» ‎ Hack a Day

We just wrapped up the Human Computer Interface challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize, and this project is pushing boundaries we’ve hardly seen before. [Giovanni Leal] is using a Leap Motion controller to move a robotic arm around in space.

The robot arm in question comes from Owi, and it is by every measure not a good robot arm. It is, however, an excellent toy filled with motors and plastic linkages that serves as a good stand-in for a proper robotic arm.

Control of this toy robot arm is done through a Leap Motion controller. While the Leap Motion is …read more

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September 30, 2018
4:00
Watch the Snappy, Insect-like Moves of this DIY Quadruped Robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

Some legged robots end up moving with ponderous deliberation, or wavering in unstable-looking jerks. A few unfortunates manage to do both at once. [MusaW]’s 3D Printed Quadruped Robot, on the other hand, moves in rapid motions that manage to look sharp and insect-like instead of unstable. Based on an earlier design he made for a 3D printable quadruped frame, [MusaW] has now released this step-by-step guide for building your own version. All that’s needed is the STL files and roughly $50 in parts from the usual Chinese resellers to have the makings of a great weekend project.

The robot uses …read more

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September 29, 2018
16:00
Walk It Off, Healing Robots
» ‎ Hack a Day

For many of us, our first robots, or technical projects, were flimsy ordeals built with cardboard, duct tape, and high hopes. Most of us grow past that scene, and we learn to work supplies which require more than a pair of kitchen scissors. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Iowa State University have made a material which goes beyond durable, it can heal itself when wounded. To a small robot, a standard hole puncher is a dire assailant, but the little guy in the video after the break keeps hopping around despite a couple of new piercings.

The researcher’s goal …read more

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13:00
Gesture Control without Fancy Sensors, Just Pots and Weights
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Dennis] aims to make robotic control a more intuitive affair by ditching joysticks and buttons, and using wireless gesture controls in their place. What’s curious is that there isn’t an accelerometer or gyro anywhere to be seen in his Palm Power! project.

The gesture sensing consists not of a fancy IMU, but of two potentiometers (one for each axis) with offset weights attached to the shafts. When the hand tilts, the weights turn the shafts of the pots, and the resulting readings are turned into motion commands and sent over Bluetooth. The design certainly has a what-you-see-is-what-you-get aspect to it, …read more

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September 24, 2018
22:01
Self-Solving Rubik’s Cube
» ‎ Hack a Day

Rubik’s Cube has been around for what seems like forever now, and has spawned an entire subculture devoted to solving the puzzle with automation. Most Rubik robots put the cube in a specially designed cradle bristling with actuators and sensors, and while those rigs are impressive, they don’t come close to this robotic Rubik solver built into the cube itself.

Fair warning that [Human Controller] doesn’t provide much detail on this build other than pictures; even translating the Japanese web page doesn’t offer much more information. But there are pictures, plus the video below, which reveal the engineering masterpiece encased …read more

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September 23, 2018
4:01
Greasing Robot Hands: Variable Friction Makes Robo-Mitts More Like Our Own
» ‎ Hack a Day

Unless you are in the fields of robotics or prosthetics, you likely take for granted the fine motor skills our hands have. Picking up and using a pen is no small feat for a robot which doesn’t have a dedicated pen-grabbing apparatus. Holding a mobile phone with the same gripper is equally daunting, not to mention moving that phone around once it has been grasped. Part of the wonder of our hands is the shape and texture which allows pens and phones to slide around at one moment, and hold fast the next moment. Yale’s Grab Lab has built a …read more

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September 22, 2018
1:00
Turn Your Teddy Bear Into A Robot With Yale’s “Robotic Skin”
» ‎ Hack a Day

Despite what we may have seen in the new Winnie the Pooh movie, our cherished plush toys don’t usually come to life. But if that’s the goal, we have ways of making it happen. Like these “robotic skins” from Yale University.

Each module is a collection of sensors and actuators mounted on a flexible substrate, which is then installed onto a flexible object serving as structure. In a simple implementation, the mechanical bits are sewn onto a piece of fabric and tied with zippers onto a piece of foam. The demonstration video (embedded below the break) runs through several more …read more

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September 19, 2018
16:00
Electric Wheelbarrow Makes Hauling Big Loads Easier
» ‎ Hack a Day

Gardening involves a depressing amount of physical activity: haul this over here, dump it there and then cover it with this. Things like wheelbarrows are still damn hard work, especially for people like who are somewhat physically compromised. That’s why we love this build from [Karl Gesslein]. He usually makes electronic bikes, adding motors to bicycles to roam the streets faster. But this time he applied his expertise to a wheelbarrow. He added a 3000W motor to the wheelbarrow, which drives the front wheel when triggered by the accelerator on the handle.

The project is a bit more sophisticated than …read more

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September 15, 2018
13:00
The Tiny, Pocket-Sized Robot Meant For Hacking
» ‎ Hack a Day

The world is full of educational robots for STEAM education, but we haven’t seen one as small or as cute as the Skoobot, an entry in this year’s Hackaday Prize. It’s barely bigger than an inch cubed, but it’s still packed with motors, a battery, sensors, and a microcontroller powerful enough to become a pocket-sized sumo robot.

The hardware inside each Skoobot is small, but powerful. The main microcontroller is a Nordic nRF52832, giving this robot an ARM Cortex-M4F brain and Bluetooth. The sensors include a VL6180X time of flight sensor that has a range of about 100mm. Skoobot also …read more

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7:00
String Art Robot Is An Autorouter In Reverse
» ‎ Hack a Day

In the depths of Etsy and Pinterest is a fascinating, if tedious, artform. String art, the process of nailing pins in a board and wrapping thread around the perimeter to create shapes and shading, The most popular project in this vein is something like putting the outline of a heart, in string, in the shape of your home state. Something like that, at least.

While this artform involves about as much effort as pallet wood furniture, there is an interesting computational aspect of it: you can create images with string art, and doing this is a very, very hard problem …read more

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September 14, 2018
16:00
Flexible PCBs Make The Fins Of This Robotic Fish
» ‎ Hack a Day

We love a little outside-the-box thinking around here, and anytime we see robots that don’t use wheels and motors to do the moving, we take notice. So when a project touting robotic fish using soft-actuator fins crossed the tip line, we had to take a look.

It turns out that this robofish comes from the fertile mind of [Carl Bugeja], whose PCB motors and flexible actuators have been covered here before. The basic concept of these fish fins is derived from the latter project, which uses coils printed onto both sides of a flexible Kapton substrate. Positioned near a magnet, …read more

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September 08, 2018
16:00
Shoelace-Tying Robot With Only Two Motors
» ‎ Hack a Day

Many things that humans do are very difficult for machines. Case in point: tying shoelaces. Think of the intricate dance of fingers crossing over fingers that it takes to pass off a lace from one hand to the other. So when a team of five students from UC Davis got together and built a machine that got the job done with two hooks, some very clever gears, and two motors, we have to say that we’re impressed. Watch it in action on Youtube (also embedded below).

The two-motor constraint would seem at first to be a show-stopper, but now that …read more

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September 05, 2018
19:00
Robots Invade Your Personal Space
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you have ever had to complete a task such as building a LEGO model over a remote connection, you will know that the challenges are like an absurd grade school group project. The person giving directions often has trouble describing what they are thinking, and the person doing the work has trouble interpreting what the instructor wants. “Turn the blue block over. No, only half way. Go back. Now turn it. No, the other way. NO! Not clockwise, downward. That’s Upward! Geez. Are you even listening‽” Good times.

While you may not be in this situation every day, the …read more

Tags: robots hacks
August 30, 2018
4:00
Real or Fake? Robot Uses AI to Find Waldo
» ‎ Hack a Day

The last few weeks have seen a number of tech sites reporting on a robot which can find and point out Waldo in those “Where’s Waldo” books. Designed and built by Redpepper, and ad agency. The robot arm is a UARM Metal, with a Raspberry Pi controlling the show.

A Logitech c525 webcam captures images, which are processed by the Pi with OpenCV, then sent to Google’s cloud-based AutoML Vision service. AutoML is trained with numerous images of Waldo, which are used to attempt a pattern match. If a pattern is found, the coordinates are fed to PYUARM, and the …read more

Tags: robots hacks
August 26, 2018
13:00
Soft Hydraulic Muscles Lift Weights As A Team
» ‎ Hack a Day

Working with hydraulics usually means having a fluid tank and valves. [consciousflesh] does away with both those for his DIY hydraulic artificial muscles. Instead, he uses a pair of muscles, both preloaded with fluid. To contract one, he pumps the fluid into the other, expanding that one, and vice versa. A bidirectional gear pump moves the fluid while also acting as a valve. And flexible materials replace heavy metal cylinders.

As we said, this is a DIY project. He made the muscles by surrounding silicone tubes with aramid fiber sleeves, giving added strength. The blocks at either end are also …read more

Tags: robots hacks
August 16, 2018
1:01
Theo Jansen Invents A Faster, Simpler, Wind-Powered Strandbeest
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Theo Jansen] has come up with an intriguing wind-powered strandbeest which races along the beach with surprising speed and grace. According to [Jansen], it “doesn’t have hinging joints like the classical strandbeests, so they don’t get sand in their joints and you don’t have to lubricate them.” It’s called UMINAMI, which appropriately means “ocean wave” in Japanese.

There are only videos of it in action to go on so far, but a lot can be gleaned from them. To make it easier to keep track of just a single leg, we’ve slowed things down and reddened one of them in …read more

Tags: robots hacks
August 10, 2018
22:00
Line Following Robot Without The Lines
» ‎ Hack a Day

Line-following robots are a great intro to robotics in general, since the materials and skills needed to build a good one aren’t too advanced. It turns out that line-following robots are more than just a learning tool, too. They’re pretty useful in industry, but most of them don’t follow visible marked lines. Some, like this inductive guided robot from [Randall] make use of wires to determine their paths.

Some of the benefits of inductive guidance over physical lines are that the wires can be hidden in floors, so if something like an automated forklift is using them at a warehouse …read more

Tags: robots hacks
August 08, 2018
4:00
Twitch Plays Battling Robots?
» ‎ Hack a Day

Audience interaction reached an all-time high in 2014 with Twitch Plays Pokemon, an online gaming stream where viewers were able to collaboratively command an emulated Game Boy playing Pokemon Red. Since then, the concept has taken off. Today, we see this extended to robots in the real world, with [theotherlonestar]’s Twitch Chat Controlled Robots.

The build is one that takes advantage of modern off-the-shelf components – an ESP8266 provides the brains, while a Pololu Zumo provides a ready to go robot chassis to save time on the mechanical aspects of the build. An L298N dual motor controller then handles …read more

Tags: robots hacks
August 03, 2018
16:00
Six Wheels (En)rolling: Mars Rovers Going To School
» ‎ Hack a Day

Few things build excitement like going to space. It captures the imagination of young and old alike. Teachers love to leverage the latest space news to raise interest in their students, and space agencies are happy to provide resources to help. The latest in a long line of educator resources released by NASA is an Open Source Rover designed at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

JPL is the birthplace of Mars rovers Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. They’ve been researching robotic explorers for decades, so it’s no surprise they have many rovers running around. The open source rover’s direct predecessor is ROV-E, …read more

Tags: robots hacks
July 29, 2018
19:01
Robot Rovers of the Early Space Race
» ‎ Hack a Day

In the early 1970s, the American space program was at a high point, having placed astronauts upon the surface of the moon while their Soviet competitors had not taken them beyond an Earth orbit. It is however a simplistic view to take this as meaning that NASA had the lead in all aspects of space exploration, because while Russians had not walked the surface of our satellite they had achieved a less glamorous feat of lunar exploration that the Americans had not. The first Lunokhod wheeled rover had reached the lunar surface and explored it under the control of earth-bound …read more

Tags: robots hacks
July 26, 2018
22:00
Couch Potato Refined: Self-Rotating TV Uses Plywood Gears
» ‎ Hack a Day

When we first saw [Mikeasaurus’] project to rotate his TV 90 degrees in case he wanted to lay down and channel surf we were ready to be unimpressed. But it grew on us as we read about how he fabricated his own gearing system to make a car seat motor rotate the TV.

The gearing system is made from plywood and the design was from geargenerator.com, a freebie design tool we’ve covered before. You’d think you’d need a laser cutter, but in this case, the gear forms were printed out, glued on the plywood and then cut out manually. Each …read more

Tags: robots hacks
July 25, 2018
16:00
Juggling Machine Listens to the Bounce to Keep Ball in the Air
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s a seemingly simple task: bounce a ping-pong ball on a wooden paddle. So simple that almost anyone can pick up a ball and a paddle and make a reasonable job of it. Now, close your eyes and try to do it just by the sound the ball makes when it hits the paddle. That’s a little tougher, but this stepper-driven platform juggler manages it with aplomb.

That’s not to say that the path to the finished product in the video below was a smooth one for [tkuhn]. He went through multiple iterations over the last two years, including a …read more

Tags: robots hacks
11:30
An Integrated Electromagnetic Lifting Module for Robots
» ‎ Hack a Day

The usual way a robot moves an object is by grabbing it with a gripper or using suction, but [Mile] believes that electromagnets offer a lot of advantages that are worth exploring, and has designed the ELM (Electromagnetic Lifting Module) in order to make experimenting with electromagnetic effectors more accessible. The ELM is much more than just a breakout board for an electromagnet; [Mile] has put a lot of work into making a module that is easy to interface with and use. ELM integrates a proximity sensor, power management, and LED lighting as well as 3D models for vertical or …read more

Tags: robots hacks
4:00
Was the Self Driving Car Invented in the 1980s?
» ‎ Hack a Day

The news is full of self-driving cars and while there is some bad news, most of it is pretty positive. It seems a foregone conclusion that it is just a matter of time before calling for an Uber doesn’t involve another person. But according to a recent article, [Ernst Dickmanns] — a German aerospace engineer — built three autonomous vehicles starting in 1986 and culminating with on-the-road demonstrations in 1994 for Daimler.

It is hard to imagine what had to take place to get a self-driving car in 1986. The article asserts that you need computer analysis of video at …read more

Tags: robots hacks
July 18, 2018
11:30
Dual Brushed Motor Controller Doesn’t Care How It Receives Commands
» ‎ Hack a Day

The simple DC brushed motor is at the heart of many a robotics project. For making little toy bots that zip around the house, you can’t beat the price and simplicity of a pair of brushed motors. They’re also easy to control; you could roll your own H-bridge out of discrete transistors, or pick up one of the commonly used ICs like the L298N or L9110S.

But what if you want an all-in-one solution? Something that will deliver enough current for most applications, drive dual motors, and deal with a wide range of input voltages. Most importantly, something that will …read more

Tags: robots hacks
July 17, 2018
8:30
Emotional Hazards That Lurk Far From The Uncanny Valley
» ‎ Hack a Day

A web search for “Uncanny Valley” will retrieve a lot of information about that discomfort we feel when an artificial creation is eerily lifelike. The syndrome tells us a lot about both human psychology and design challenges ahead. What about the opposite, when machines are clearly machines? Are we all clear? It turns out the answer is “No” as [Christine Sunu] explained at a Hackaday Los Angeles meetup. (Video also embedded below.)

When we build a robot, we know what’s inside the enclosure. But people who don’t know tend to extrapolate too much based only on the simple behavior they …read more

Tags: robots hacks
July 14, 2018
22:00
Robot Maps Rooms with Help From iPhone
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Unity engine has been around since Apple started using Intel chips, and has made quite a splash in the gaming world. Unity allows developers to create 2D and 3D games, but there are some other interesting applications of this gaming engine as well. For example, [matthewhallberg] used it to build a robot that can map rooms in 3D.

The impetus for this project was a robotics company that used a series of robots around their business. The robots navigate using computer vision, but couldn’t map the rooms from scratch. They hired [matthewhallberg] to tackle this problem, and this robot …read more

Tags: robots hacks
July 11, 2018
8:00
Hold the Salt and Butter, This Popcorn Is For a Robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

Popcorn! Light and fluffy, it is a fantastically flexible snack. We can have them plain, create a savory snack with some salt and butter, or cover with caramel if you have a sweet tooth. Now Cornell University showed us one more way to enjoy popcorn: use their popping action as the mechanical force in a robot actuator.

It may be unorthodox at first glance, but it makes a lot of sense. We pop corn by heating its water until it turns into steam triggering a rapid expansion of volume. It is not terribly different from our engines burning an air-fuel …read more

Tags: robots hacks
1:00
Cheetah 3 Is Learning To Move Blindly Before Learning To See
» ‎ Hack a Day

Stand up right now and walk around for a minute. We’re pretty sure you didn’t see everywhere you stepped nor did you plan each step meticulously according to visual input. So why should robots do the same? Wouldn’t your robot be more versatile if it could use its vision to plan a path, but leave most of the walking to the legs with the help of various sensors and knowledge of joint positions?

That’s the approach [Sangbae Kim] and a team of researchers at MIT are taking with their Cheetah 3. They’ve given it cameras but aren’t using them yet. …read more

Tags: robots hacks
July 08, 2018
22:00
Disney’s Humanoid Stunt Robots Throw Multiple Backflips No Sweat
» ‎ Hack a Day

What’s the biggest problem right now with humanoid robots? They fall down. Disney seems to have solved that problem here by making robots that are meant to fall down and be caught by a net. Disney’s research arm (you may know them as Imagineers) is showing off a robot called Stuntronic which can perform controlled somersaults as it flies through the air. Check the video below, you really have to watch a few times to make sure this is a robot and not a person.

It’s really interesting to follow the evolution of this robot. It began with BRICK, a …read more

Tags: robots hacks
July 03, 2018
13:01
Disney’s New Robot Limbs Trained Using Neural Networks
» ‎ Hack a Day

Disney is working on modular, intelligent robot limbs that snap into place with magnets. The intelligence comes from a reasonable sized neural network that also incorporates some modularity. The robot is their Snapbot whose base unit can fit up to eight of limbs, and so far they’ve trained with up to three together.

The modularity further extends to a choice of three types of limb. One with roll and pitch, another with yaw and pitch, and a third with roll, yaw, and pitch. Interestingly, of the three types, the yaw-pitch one seems most effective.

In this age of massive, deep …read more

Tags: robots hacks
July 01, 2018
13:00
Raspberry Pi Zero Stepper Driver, First of Many Modules
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Raspberry Pi in general (and the Zero W model in particular) are wonderful pieces of hardware, but they’re not entirely plug-and-play when it comes to embedded applications. The user is on the hook for things like providing a regulated power source, an OS, and being mindful of proper shutdown and ESD precautions. Still, the capabilities make it worth considering and [Alpha le ciel] has a project to make implementation easier with the Raspberry Pi Zero W Stepper Motor Module, which is itself part of a larger project plan to make the Pi Zero W into a robust building block …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 29, 2018
8:30
When The Going Gets Tough, These Wheels Transform To Tracks
» ‎ Hack a Day

When we want to build something to go where wheels could not, the typical solution is to use tracks. But the greater mobility comes with trade-offs: one example being tracked vehicles can’t go as fast as a wheeled counterpart. Information released by DARPA’s ground experimental vehicle technology (GXV-T) program showed what might come out of asking “why can’t we switch to tracks just when we need them?”

This ambitious goal to literally reinvent the wheel was tackled by Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center. They delivered the “Reconfigurable Wheel-Track” (RWT) that can either roll like a wheel or travel on …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 26, 2018
11:30
Controlling Robotics Visually
» ‎ Hack a Day

The world — and the Hackaday Prize — is filled with educational robots. These are small, wheeled robots loaded up with sensors, actuators, a few motor drivers, and some sort of system that is easy to program. The idea behind these educational robots is to give students an easy-to-use platform to test out code, learn inverse kinematics, and realize odometry is a lot harder than you think it is. Give these kids some time and patience, and you’ll have a fleet of Battlebots at the end of the semester, if the teacher is cool.

But there’s a problem with all …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 23, 2018
13:00
ROPS Will Be The Board x86 Robot Builders Are Waiting For
» ‎ Hack a Day

If your robot has outgrown a Raspberry Pi and only the raw computing power of an x86 motherboard will suffice, you are likely to encounter a problem with its interfaces. The days of ISA cards are long gone, and a modern PC is not designed to easily talk to noisy robot hardware. Accessible ports such as USB can have interfaces connected to them, but suffer from significant latency in the process.

A solution comes from ROPS, or Robot on a PCI-e Stick, a card that puts an FPGA on a blazing-fast PCI-e card that provides useful real-world interfaces such …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 22, 2018
11:30
Evolving the 3D Printed Linear Actuator
» ‎ Hack a Day

Our open source community invites anyone with an idea to build upon the works of those who came before. Many of us have encountered a need to control linear motion and adapted an inexpensive hobby servo for the task. [Michael Graham] evaluated existing designs and believed he has ideas to advance the state of the art. Our Hackaday Prize judges agreed, placing his 3D Printed Servo Linear Actuator as one of twenty winners of our Robotics Module Challenge.

[Michael]’s actuator follows in the footstep of other designs based on a rack-and-pinion gear such as this one featured on these pages, …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 21, 2018
22:00
[Festo’s] Underwater Robot Uses Body-Length Fins
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Festo] have come up with yet another amazing robot, a swimming one this time with an elegant propulsion mechanism. They call it the BionicFinWave. Two fins on either side almost a body-length long create a wave which pushes water backward, making the robot move forward. It’s modeled after such fish as the cuttlefish and the Nile perch.

What was their elegant solution for making the fins undulate? Nine lever arms are attached to each fin. Those lever arms are controlled by two crankshafts which extend from the front of the body to the rear, one for each side. A servo …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 19, 2018
1:00
Tables are Turned as Robots Assemble IKEA Furniture
» ‎ Hack a Day

Hackaday pages are rife with examples of robots being built with furniture parts. In this example, the tables are turned and robots are the masters of IKEA pieces. We are not silly enough to assume that these robots unfolded the instructions, looked at one another, scratched their CPUs, and began assembling. Of course, the procedure was preordained by the programmers, but the way they mate the pegs into the ends of the cross-members is a very human thing to do. It reminds us of finding a phone charging socket in the dark. This kind of behavior is due to force …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 16, 2018
13:00
A 3D-Printed Robot Actuator
» ‎ Hack a Day

Somehow, walking robots at our level never really seem to deliver on the promise that should be delivered by all those legs. Articulation using hobby servos is simple enough to achieve, but cumbersome, slow, and not very powerful. [Paul Gould] has a plan to make a better, 3D-printed articulated robot actuator.

His solution is both novel and elegant, a fairly conventional arm geometry that has at its joints a set of brushless motors similar to but a little larger than the kind you might be more familiar with on multirotors, paired with 3D-printed cycloidal gearboxes. Magnetic encoders provide the necessary …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 14, 2018
16:00
Making Robot Snakes That Slither, Sidewind, And Strike
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Will Donaldson] has been making robot snakes of all sorts. One of his snakes hugs the ground, slithering across it with a sine wave motion. Flipping it on its side and calling different code, that same snake also moves like an inchworm. Another of his snakes lifts parts of itself upward to move sideways across the ground, again using sine waves.

At first, his slithering snake would only oscillate in place on the floor. Looking more closely at biological snakes, he found that part of the reason they moved forward was due to their scales. The scales move smoothly over …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 13, 2018
8:00
Rescuing K-9
» ‎ Hack a Day

Fans of the long-running and ever-fantastic British TV show Dr. Who will no doubt hold a soft spot in their hearts for the Doctor’s little robot companion. No, not one of his many human sidekicks, we’re talking about K-9, the angular dog-like android that burst onto British screens back in 1977.

There were a number of original [K-9] props made by the BBC, and these were eventually sold by the corporation. One found its way to Abertay University, and it was there that [Gary Taylor], a computer science student found it. Sadly the years had not been kind to the …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 11, 2018
4:00
[James Bruton] Is Making A Dog: OpenDog Project
» ‎ Hack a Day

There was a time when a two-legged walking robot was the thing to make. But after seeing years of Boston Dynamic’s amazing four-legged one’s, more DIYers are switching to quadrupeds. Now we can add master DIY robot builder [James Bruton] to the list with his openDog project. What’s exciting here is that with [James’] extensive robot-building background, this is more like starting the challenge from the middle rather than the beginning and we should see exciting results sooner rather than later.

Thus far [James] has gone through the planning stage, having iterated through a few versions using Fusion 360, and …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 10, 2018
19:00
High Voltage Switching with MOSFETs
» ‎ Hack a Day

Using a MOSFET as a switch is generally pretty simple. Make the gate voltage sufficient with respect to the source and current flows through the channel. However, if you are switching higher voltages, you may need some additional circuitry to protect the device’s gate and possibly the microcontroller driving the whole thing, too. [Lewis] discusses high voltage switching in the latest in his series of videos dealing with MOSFETs. You can see the video below.

You’ll see in the video a breadboard setup driving a 50 V load and also a higher-voltage H-bridge. There are three major topics covered: Using …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 09, 2018
19:00
Japanese Fire-Fighting Dragon Rides Water Jets
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you are building a robot to fight fires, why not use the water that you are fighting fires with to propel your robot? That seems to be the idea behind the Dragon Fire Fighting robot built by [Professor Satoshi Tadokoro], and his team at Tadohoku University. Their dragon robot is raised by the same directed jets of water that are used to stop the fire.

The three-meter robot also uses these jets of water to steer, moving the dragon’s head by firing water jets at angles. I’m not sure how practical it really is, though: the jets that the …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 03, 2018
13:00
Turning That Old Hoverboard Into A Learning Platform
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Isabelle Simova] is building Hoverbot, a flexible robotics platform using Ikea plastic trays, JavaScript running on a Raspberry Pi and parts scavenged from commonly available hoverboards.

Self-balancing scooters a.k.a. Hoverboards are a great source of parts for such a project. Their high torque, direct drive brushless motors can drive loads of 100 kg or more. In addition, you also get a matching motor controller board, a rechargeable battery and its charging circuit. Most hoverboard controllers use the STM32F103, so flashing them with your own firmware becomes easy using a ST-link V2 programmer.

The next set of parts you need to …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 02, 2018
13:00
Servo Becomes Mini Linear Actuator
» ‎ Hack a Day

RC servos are a common component in many robotics projects, but [Giovanni Leal] needed linear motion instead of the rotary actuation that servos normally offer. The 3D Printed Mini Linear Actuator was developed as a way to turn a mini servo into a linear actuator, giving it more power in the process.

A servo uses a potentiometer attached to the output shaft in order to sense position, and the internal electronics take care of driving the motor to move the shaft to the desired angle. [Giovanni] took apart an economical mini servo and after replacing the motor with a 100:1 …read more

Tags: robots hacks
June 01, 2018
22:00
A HID For Robots
» ‎ Hack a Day

Whether with projects featured here or out in the real world, we have a tendency to focus most upon the end product. The car, solar panel, or even robot. But there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes that needs to be taken care of as well, whether it’s fuel infrastructure to keep the car running, a semiconductor manufacturer to create silicon wafers, or a control system for the robot. This project is one of the latter: a human interface device for a robot arm that is completely DIY.

While robots are often automated, some still need human input. …read more

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May 26, 2018
19:00
DIY Submersible Aims for Low Cost, Ease of Operation
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you’re like us, a body of water is a source of wonder and awe. The wonder comes from imagining what lies hidden below the surface, and the awe is from the fear of trying to find out and becoming one of those submerged objects on a permanent basis. So if you want to explore the depths in relative comfort and safety, a DIY remotely operated underwater vehicle might be the thing you need to build.

Most ROV builds these days seem to follow more or less similar designs, which is probably because they all share project goals similar to …read more

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May 22, 2018
11:30
Smiling Robot Moves Without Wires
» ‎ Hack a Day

What could be cuter than a little robot that scuttles around its playpen and smiles all day? For the 2018 Hackaday prize [bobricius] is sharing his 2D Actuator for Micro Magnetic Robot. The name is not so cute, but it boasts a bill of materials under ten USD, so it should be perfect for educational use, which is why it is being created.

The double-layer circuit board hides six poles. Three poles run vertically, and three of them run horizontally. Each pole is analogous to a winding in a stepper motor. As the poles turn on, the magnetic shuttle moves …read more

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May 21, 2018
1:00
RoMeLa’s Sideways Walking Robot Has Evolved More Limbs
» ‎ Hack a Day

Despite the success shown in prototypes from groups like Boston Dynamics, bipedal walking is still really hard to implement. When the robot lifts one leg, it has to shift its center of gravity over the other leg to avoid falling sideways.

The Autonomous Legged Personal Helper Robot with Enhanced Dynamics (ALPHRED) is getting around this problem by coming at it from a different angle. ALPHRED walks sideways and throws away the distinction between arms and legs.

The bot is RoMeLa at UCLA’s latest evolution in their approach to traditional bipedal roadblocks. Sideways walking is something we covered when we talked …read more

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May 16, 2018
1:00
Gentle Electric Eel
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s no shock that electric eels get a bad rap for being scary creatures. They are slithery fleshy water snakes who can call down lightning. Biologists and engineers at the University of California had something else in mind when they designed their electric eel. Instead of hunting fish, this one swims harmlessly alongside them.

Traditional remotely operated vehicles have relied on hard shells and spinning propellers. To marine life, this is noisy and unnatural. A silent swimmer doesn’t raise any eyebrows, not that fish have eyebrows. The most innovative feature is the artificial muscles, and although the details are scarce, …read more

Tags: robots hacks
May 08, 2018
11:30
Mike’s Robot Dog Is A First Step In The Right Direction
» ‎ Hack a Day

Humans can traverse pretty much any terrain thanks to their legs and fast-acting balancing system. So if you want a robot which should have equal flexibility, legs are a good way to go, this confirmed by all the achievements of Boston Dynamics’ robots. It was therefore natural for [Mike Rigsby] to model his robot dog after Boston Dynamics’ dog-like robot, SpotMini.

The build log on his Hackaday.io page makes for interesting reading. For example, he started out with the legs oriented like SpotMini but found that when trying to stand, the front legs worked fine but the rear ones slid …read more

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May 03, 2018
13:00
Colossal Hydraulic Hulkbuster Is Classic Colin Furze
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Colin Furze] is back at it – once again shrugging off the confines of feasibility and laughing in the face of sanity, all whilst sporting the signature tie with unrivalled style.

Teaming up with [James Bruton], the result of their collective talent this time is a hydraulic hulkbuster suit, at a frankly ridiculous scale. This is the third and final episode of the build process, with the first two covering the legs and body.

To demonstrate the strength of his latest toy, [Colin] tapes himself to the arm of his creation and promptly gets swung into a wall. We still …read more

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April 30, 2018
16:00
Training The Squirrel Terminator
» ‎ Hack a Day

Depending on which hemisphere of the Earth you’re currently reading this from, summer is finally starting to fight its way to the surface. For the more “green” of our readers, that can mean it’s time to start making plans for summer gardening. But as anyone who’s ever planted something edible can tell you, garden pests such as squirrels are fantastically effective at turning all your hard work into a wasteland. Finding ways to keep them away from your crops can be a full-time job, but luckily it’s a job nobody will mind if automation steals from humans.

[Peter Quinn] writes …read more

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1:00
Papercraft-Inspired Snake-bot Slithers like a Real One
» ‎ Hack a Day

Blend the Japanese folding technique of Kirigami with an elastomer actuator, and what have you got? A locomoting snake robot that can huff around its own girth with no strings attached! That’s exactly what researchers at the Wyss Institute and Harvard School of Applied Sciences did to build their Kirigami Crawler.

Expanding and contracting propel this crawler forward. As the actuator expands, the hatched pattern on the plastic skin flares out; and when it contracts, the skin retracts to a smoother form. The flared hatch pattern acts like a cluster of little hooks, snagging multiple contact points into the ground. …read more

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April 28, 2018
16:00
The Cake Robot is No Lie
» ‎ Hack a Day

[52 Skillz] didn’t know anything about building robots. So he decided to not just read about it or make a simple robot. He jumped right in and wanted to build a robot that could make a cake. It took about a year and a half but it now — mostly — works, as you can see in the video below.

Granted it isn’t perfect and it isn’t really all that practical. But as a learning exercise, it was certainly ambitious and successful. Apparently, you still have to scrape the bowl a little by hand to get some of the flour …read more

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April 26, 2018
8:30
Writing On A Whiteboard, Performed By A Robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

For some of us here at Hackaday, school is but a very distant memory. All that teenage awkwardness we’d rather forget, synth pop, and 8-bit computers were cool the first time around, and our newer classrooms didn’t have blackboards any more. The Whiteboard Future Had Arrived, and it came with solvent-laden pens that our more rebellious classmates swore would get you high if you sniffed them for long enough. Innocent times. Kids nowadays probably get their lessons from iPads, but the whiteboard isn’t finished just yet. [f4hdk] has updated his board with Scribot, a whiteboard-writing robot arm driven by a …read more

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April 16, 2018
19:00
Learning Software In A Soft Exosuit
» ‎ Hack a Day

Wearables and robots don’t often intersect, because most robots rely on rigid bodies and programming while we don’t. Exoskeletons are an instance where robots interact with our bodies, and a soft exosuit is even closer to our physiology. Machine learning is closer to our minds than a simple state machine. The combination of machine learning software and a soft exosuit is a match made in heaven for the Harvard Biodesign Lab and Agile Robotics Lab.

Machine learning studies a walker’s steady gait for twenty periods while vitals are monitored to assess how much energy is being expended. After watching, the …read more

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April 08, 2018
13:00
Floor Mopping Robot Takes Cleanliness to the Next Level
» ‎ Hack a Day

While it’s nice to have a robot vacuum your floors for you, a vacuum can only clean your house so much. For a really deep clean, you’ll also need to run a mop over the hard floor surfaces. [Josh] took this to its logical conclusion and built a robot that can really scour his floors for his entry into this year’s Hackaday Prize.

The robot has the ability to spray the floor with a cleaning solution, and then drive over it and scrub the floors with a squeegee. Its designed in a way that allows it to get into tight …read more

Tags: robots hacks
April 07, 2018
7:00
These Gorgeous Robot Parts are Hand-Made
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Dickel]’s robot MDi #4 has been in progress for several years, but what we wanted to draw your attention to is the way the parts have been fabricated and what kind of remarkable results are possible with careful design, measurement, cutting, and finishing. Much of MDi #4 was made by hand-cutting and drilling sheets of high impact polystyrene (HIPS) with a utility knife and layering them as needed. Epoxy and aluminum provide gap filling and reinforcement of key sections, and fiberglass took care of one of the larger sections.

The process [Dickel] follows is to prototype using cardboard first. Parts …read more

Tags: robots hacks
April 02, 2018
11:30
A Well-Chronicled Adventure in Tiny Robotics
» ‎ Hack a Day

Some of us get into robotics dreaming of big heavy metal, some of us go in the opposite direction to build tiny robots scurrying around our tabletops. Our Hackaday.io community has no shortage of robots both big and small, each an expression of its maker’s ideals. For 2018 Hackaday Prize, [Bill Weiler] entered his vision in the form of Project Johnson Tiny Robot.

[Bill] is well aware of the challenges presented by working at a scale this small. (If he wasn’t before, he certainly is now…) Forging ahead with his ideas on how to build a tiny robot, and it’ll …read more

Tags: robots hacks
8:30
Zen and the Art of Japanese Tea Robots
» ‎ Hack a Day

In Japan, tea ceremony (cha-dou) is revered as a way to a gain deeper insights into life and philosophy. Traditional Japanese tea ceremony practitioners put in long hours to master the intricacies and details of pouring tea. The road to becoming a tea master is crucial as it develops the practitioner’s mental state as well as physical technique.

However if you don’t have time to master the “way of tea”, then you can build a bot and automate your zen experience. That’s exactly what the people at Ano Labs did when they built their Japanese Tea Ceremony Robot #151A.

The …read more

Tags: robots hacks
March 26, 2018
22:00
IQ Makes Smarter Motors
» ‎ Hack a Day

Enclosure: [download]

We think of motors typically as pretty dumb devices. Depending on the kind, you send them some current or some pulses, and they turn. No problem. Even an RC servo, which has some smarts on board, doesn’t have a lot of capability. However, there is a new generation of smart motors out that combine the mechanical motor mechanism with a built-in controller. [Bunnie] looks at one that isn’t even called a motor. It is the IQ position module.

Despite the name, these devices are just a brushless DC motor (BLDC) with a controller and an API. There’s no gearing, so …read more

Tags: robots hacks
4:00
Robot Uses Iron Man Tech to Walk
» ‎ Hack a Day

Designing a bi-pedal robot is a relatively straight forward task, given the array of tools that we now have at our disposal. There are many open source examples out there for anyone to get started. Designing one that doesn’t fall over a lot… well that’s not so simple. This is because when we walk our center of balance is constantly shifting, so during our adolescence we learn to shift our body weight around to maintain a stable center of balance. By the time we hit our mid-teens most of us have mastered the art of walking, and can maintain stability …read more

Tags: robots hacks
March 25, 2018
13:00
Rechargeable Robot Mows Lawns
» ‎ Hack a Day

Perhaps one day our robot overlords will look back on all of the trivial things that humans made them do and take retribution on us. Until then, though, there’s no problem having them perform all of our chores. [v.loschiavo] is also exploiting our future rulers and built a robot that mows his lawn automatically as his entry into the 2018 Hackaday Prize.

The robot uses a rechargeable battery system to drive a nylon blade for grass cutting. It also has an obstacle detection and avoidance system that allows it to find the borders of your yard and keep from getting …read more

Tags: robots hacks
March 19, 2018
4:00
Learn Programming From Ants
» ‎ Hack a Day

Humans and insects think on a different scale, but entomologists study the behavior of these little organisms, so they’re not a complete mystery. There isn’t much intelligence in a single ant or a cubic millimeter of gray matter, but when they all start acting together, you get something greater than the sum of the parts. It is easy to fall into the trap of putting all the intelligence or programming into a single box since that’s how we function. Comparatively, itty-bitty brains, like microcontrollers and single-board computers are inexpensive and plentiful. Enter swarm mentality, and new tasks become possible.

[Kevin …read more

Tags: robots hacks
March 17, 2018
4:00
Balloons and Bubbles Make for Kid-Friendly Robot Deathmatch
» ‎ Hack a Day

Because nothing says “fun for kids” like barbed wire and hypodermic needles, here’s an interactive real-world game that everyone can enjoy. Think of it as a kinder, gentler version of Robot Wars, where the object of the game is to pop the balloon on the other player’s robot before yours get popped. Sounds simple, but the simple games are often the most engaging, and that sure seems to be the case here.

The current incarnation of “Bubble Blast” stems from a project [Niklas Roy] undertook for a festival in Tunisia in 2017. That first version used heavily hacked toy …read more

Tags: robots hacks
March 12, 2018
8:31
Rubik’s Robot So Fast It Looks Like a Glitch in the Matrix
» ‎ Hack a Day

From Ferraris to F-16s, some things just look fast. This Rubik’s Cube solving robot not only looks fast, it is fast: it solved a standard cube in 380 milliseconds. Blink during the video below and you’ll miss it — even on the high-speed we had trouble keeping track of the number of moves this solution took. It looked like about 20.

Beating the previous robot record of 637 milliseconds is just the icing on the cake of a very cool build undertaken by [Ben Katz]. He and his collaborator [Jared] put together a robot with a decidedly industrial look — …read more

Tags: robots hacks
January 06, 2013
5:01
Who would win in a fight, robot [Lemmy] or robot God?
» ‎ Hack a Day

So this is what happens when a fan of The Rock-afire Explosion grows up. Meet Compressorhead, a musical trio of hydraulic and pneumatic musical mastery. Compressorhead is a lean band, consisting of only three members. Stickboy, the drummer, is a four-armed beast reminiscent of [General Grievous] that plays a 14-piece Pearl kit with a double [...]
Tags: robot compressorhead fight rock-afire-explosion pearl general-grievous god robot-god pearl-kit robots
January 05, 2013
7:01
Brute forcing a GPS PIN
» ‎ Hack a Day

[JJ] picked up a Garmin Nuvi 780 GPS from an auction recently. One of the more frustrating features [JJ] ran into is it’s PIN code; this GPS can’t be unlocked unless a four-digit code is entered, or it’s taken to a ‘safe location’. Not wanting to let his auction windfall go to waste, [JJ] rigged [...]
Tags: gps pin auction pin-code digit-code windfall robots hacks
January 03, 2013
3:01
Tentacles and phalanges made from drinking straws
» ‎ Hack a Day

He human hand is one of the most impressive pieces of machinery – biological, mechanical, or otherwise – that you’ll ever lay eyes on. With two dozen degrees of freedom, the hand can gently caress the most fragile flower petal without bruising it, or beat a hammer into an anvil with tremendous force. Simulating the human hand, however, [...]
Tags: tentacles drinking hand drinking-straws fragile-flower flower-petal robots hacks
December 24, 2012
12:01
Robot can barely move with so much hardware strapped to it
» ‎ Hack a Day

We think that [Andrej Škraba] needs to start looking for a beefier motor platform. This little robot has so much hardware strapped to it the motors can barely keep up. But with a little help it can make its way around the house, and it takes a whole lot of connectivity and computing power along [...]
Tags: kraba Hardware robot andrej computing-power whole-lot robots hacks
December 21, 2012
12:01
Webcam eye-tracking moves robot-powered Skittles candy
» ‎ Hack a Day

This is a great hack, and it’s an advertisement. We wish this were the norm when it comes to advertising because they’ve really got our number. Skittles enlisted a few engineers to build a web interface that moves robot-powered candies. When we started looking into this we figured that a few robots were covered with [...]
Tags: webcam candy skittles skittles-candy eye-tracking web-interface robots hacks
December 18, 2012
5:01
The Hexapod Hexacopter
» ‎ Hack a Day

Over at Mad Lab Industries, they had the idea of building a quadcopter that could walk and fly. By combining a hexapod with a hexacopter, they ended up with this creation. The hexapod part started off with PhantomX Hexapod Kit, but it was far too heavy to fly. To reduce weight, they manufactured carbon fibre parts [...]
Tags: hexacopter mad hexapod mad-lab carbon-fibre fly robots hacks
December 11, 2012
11:01
Retrotechtacular: A 1983 walking robot called ODEX-1
» ‎ Hack a Day

ODEX-1 is called the first commercial walking robot in this video from 1983. Of course you will quickly recognize this as a hexapod. It’s hard to get over the fact that what was so advanced at the time can now be built at home relatively inexpensively. As with most of these retrotectacular posts the presentation is a [...]
Tags: retrotechtacular robot odex walking-robot hexapod robots hacks
December 08, 2012
7:00
Bird buggy soothes a screeching parrot
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Andrew] has enjoyed the company of [Pepper] the parrot for more than a decade, but the screeching of a bird in the next room is something you just don’t get used to. [Pepper] gets very lonely some times, and short of having someone carry him around on a shoulder, there’s not much that will calm [...]
Tags: parrot buggy bird pepper andrew robots hacks
December 05, 2012
6:00
RC car transforms into RC robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

After nearly 30 years since the first episode of Transformers aired, someone has finally done it. A company named Brave Robotics out of Japan has created a true transformer robot that is half remote control car and half remote control bipedal robot. According to the Brave Robotics’ site, this creation is the result of more than 10 years. [...]
Tags: robot brave car japan remote-control-car transformer-robot robotics robots hacks
December 03, 2012
12:01
Dyson engineers’ hacks traverse robot obstacle course
» ‎ Hack a Day

These guys are all engineers who are employed by Dyson. They’re holding remote control creations made from Dyson parts. This time around the object of the challenge was to build a bot based on a the Dyson ball and race it through an obstacle course. This sort of thing is right up our alley, but [...]
Tags: obstacle dyson course obstacle-course hacks robots
December 02, 2012
5:01
Pixar-style lamp project is a huge animatronics win
» ‎ Hack a Day

Even with the added hardware that lamp still looks relatively normal. But its behavior is more than remarkable. The lamp interacts with people in an incredibly lifelike way. This is of course inspired by the lamp from Pixar’s Luxo Jr. short film. But there’s a little bit of most useless machine added just for fun. [...]
Tags: pixar-style lamp project luxo-jr lamp-project added-hardware robots hacks
November 29, 2012
10:01
Science fair project sorts recyclables
» ‎ Hack a Day

This crew of high schoolers built a sorting robot for the Smart Young Mindz challenge. We got pretty excited when hearing that it sorts plastic by its recycling code, but unfortunately this isn’t quite what it’s made out to be. The device uses an RFID code on each product to figure out where it goes. Their [...]
Tags: science code project science-fair-project high-schoolers sorts robots hacks
November 27, 2012
3:01
Hola! From a Spanish Speaking Drawing Arm
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Acorv] wrote in to tell us about his latest hack, a robotic arm that writes with a marker. In the video after the break, the arm is set to copy whatever someone writes in a touchpad. As you might guess from this video, the hack is written up in Spanish, but it’s nothing your favorite [...]
Tags: video speaking ARM hola robotic-arm touchpad marker robots hacks
November 23, 2012
11:01
High tech tagging adds graffiti to poles
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Akira] looks to increase his urban canvas by tagging poles which some custom hardware. If you’re looking to add some art to a lamp post, height becomes a problem. That’s where this little guy comes in. The remote-controlled pole climber includes a marker that leaves a trail as the device climbs and descends. The rig [...]
Tags: tech canvas graffiti akira pole-climber custom-hardware lamp-post robots hacks
November 21, 2012
11:01
Update on [James'] bipedal robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

From the looks of the latest update [James] has made quite a bit of progress on his bipedal robot. He added to the top of the post just a few days ago, but didn’t include the video link which you’ll find embedded after the break. There’s about ten minutes of explanation before he gets down [...]
Tags: robot update bipedal james bipedal-robot video-link few-days robots hacks
November 10, 2012
7:00
Heat-seeking firebot drowns out the flames
» ‎ Hack a Day

This robot can find and extinguish fires automatically. It is the culmination of an Embedded Design class project from last school year. [Dan] and his classmates developed a turret that holds both a spray nozzle and heat sensor which would be a fantastic building block for a real-life tower defense game. The jewel of the [...]
Tags: heat-seeking robot firebot dan tower-defense-game spray-nozzle robots hacks
October 27, 2012
7:00
OpenPLC, for industrial automation to Halloween displays
» ‎ Hack a Day

Stepping out onto just about any factory floor you’ll find complex automatons building anything and everything imaginable. These machines need to be controlled somehow and before the age of computers these manufacturing robots were controlled with relays wired together to produce a multitude of actions. Relays, no matter how reliable and bulletproof the are, can’t be programmed without [...]
Tags: openplc automation halloween industrial-automation multitude robots Hardware
7:00
OpenPLC, for industrial automation to Halloween displays
» ‎ Hack a Day

Stepping out onto just about any factory floor you’ll find complex automatons building anything and everything imaginable. These machines need to be controlled somehow and before the age of computers these manufacturing robots were controlled with relays wired together to produce a multitude of actions. Relays, no matter how reliable and bulletproof the are, can’t be programmed without [...]
Tags: openplc automation halloween industrial-automation multitude robots Hardware
October 26, 2012
11:01
DARPA funded Robot Ninja Warrior?
» ‎ Hack a Day

Fans of the game show Ninja Warrior will immediately recognize the similarity of this test apparatus as the Spider Climb. Of course that’s not a human contestant, but a humanoid robot developed by Boston Dynamics. And it’s not actually clinging to the vertical walls as its only support. There are two narrow ledges to either side on [...]
Tags: warrior ninja robot boston ninja-warrior boston-dynamics humanoid-robot robots hacks
October 22, 2012
13:01
Battling most useless machine gets an expressive upgrade
» ‎ Hack a Day

We suppose the only thing more useless than a most useless machine is giving it an emoticon face. But that’s exactly what has happened with this project. But you’ll want to seen the whole thing, as the presentation involves much more than an angry box that can shut itself off. This is the second iteration [...]
Tags: thing machine battling iteration robots hacks
October 19, 2012
12:01
Robot performing a tightrope act
» ‎ Hack a Day

This robot is able walk the tightrope (translated). Well, it’s more of a shuffle than a walk, but still a lot better than we could do. In the video after the break you can see the bot starting on the platform to the right. As it steps out onto the wire (which rides in a [...]
Tags: walk robot tightrope tightrope-act walk-the-tightrope shuffle robots hacks
October 17, 2012
15:01
Tank tread robot build aims for a smooth ride
» ‎ Hack a Day

There’s all kinds of interesting things going into this tank robot build, but that beautiful suspension system immediately caught our eye. It helps to protect the body of the robot from being shaken apart when traveling over rough surfaces. Make sure to check out the four parts of the build log which are found on [...]
Tags: robot tank ride rough-surfaces smooth-ride suspension-system robots hacks
October 15, 2012
9:00
Controlling a robot with your mind
» ‎ Hack a Day

For [Ern]‘s MEng group project, his group had to develop a robotics platform capable of achieving some end goal. Because innovation is a large part of the grade, [Ern] convinced his team members to work with a brain controlled interface and build a mind controlled robotics platform. For wont of having an easy build, [Ern] [...]
Tags: group mind ern group-project meng robotics robots hacks
October 14, 2012
14:00
Have a baby? Build another one!
» ‎ Hack a Day

Ever since his daughter was born, [Markus] has been keeping logs full of observations of human behavior. Despite how it sounds, this sort of occurrence isn’t terribly odd; the field of developmental psychology is filled with research of this sort. It’s what [Markus] is doing with this data that makes his project unique. He’s attempting to use [...]
Tags: baby build sort markus developmental-psychology human-behavior occurrence robots hacks
October 03, 2012
16:01
200 pound, WiFi deploying robot ran over my foot
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Adam Bercu] and [Dan Landers] from Artisan’s Asylum in Somerville, MA brought a very, very cool toy to Maker Faire this year. It’s a two hundred pound WiFi repeater deploying robot able to amble across unforgiving terrain and my foot. The robot is controlled through a web interface with the help of a front-mounted web cam [...]
Tags: pound robot wifi dan-landers adam-bercu unforgiving-terrain bercu web-interface robots hacks
8:00
Intelligent autonomous vehicle makes it to Maker Faire
» ‎ Hack a Day

A few guys from Rutgers showed up at Maker Faire with Navi, their vehicle for the 2012 Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition. Powered by two huge lead acid batteries, Navi features enough high-end hardware to hopefully make it through or around just about any terrain. Loaded up with a laser range finder, a stereo camera setup, [...]
Tags: maker vehicle intelligent lead-acid-batteries laser-range-finder autonomous-vehicle robots hacks
October 02, 2012
11:01
Professional looking dog robot was actually [Martin's] Master’s Thesis
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you think this thing looks good you should see it move. [Martin Smith] hit a home run on the project, which was his Master’s Thesis. Fifteen servo motors provide a way for the bot to move around. Having been modeled after a small canine the gait is very realistic. The tail is even functional, acting as [...]
Tags: master professional thesis martin-smith martin gait robot robots hacks
8:00
Whatever a phobia of fingers is called, this is it.
» ‎ Hack a Day

Touched is a project by [Rebecca Strauss] that integrates servos, strings, and felt into a horrifying kinetic sculpture made up of a dozen mechanical fingers straight from a Boschian nightmare. The fingers are made up of segments of wood articulated with the help of a small string. Each pair of fingers is controlled by a [...]
Tags: phobia touched project rebecca-strauss mechanical-fingers kinetic-sculpture robots hacks
September 25, 2012
10:01
Wii Nunchuck controlled robot exhibits rock solid balancing
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Willy Wampa] is showing off his self-balancing robot. What strikes us about the build is how well tuned his feedback loop seems to be. In the video after the break you will see that there is absolutely no visible oscillation used to keep its balance. The parts used are quite easy to obtain. The acrylic [...]
Tags: wii nunchuck robot willy-wampa wampa feedback-loop robots hacks
September 19, 2012
11:01
Qube robots use well-designed laser-cut acrylic
» ‎ Hack a Day

These robot cubes, called BOXZ, use an interesting interlocking part design to mount and protect the parts within. But to really make them pop you need to color and apply your own papercraft skins. The actual hardware is quite simple. They’ve used an Arduino, along with motor driver and Bluetooth shields, to control a set [...]
Tags: qube robot boxz arduino laser-cut shields robots hacks

September 11, 2012
21:36
[Video] Robots for fun and research
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Verena Hafner
Tags: robotics
Event: Chaos Communication Congress 22th (22C3) 2005
Abstract: In this talk, several examples of cutting-edge research in robotics will be presented, and their implications for the future of robotics will be discussed. Robots will play an increasingly important role in the development of Artificial Intelligence. Many researchers are convinced that for machines to become truly intelligent, they will need to be embodied. Contemporary research in intelligent robotics does not only draw inspiration from biology and psychology, but also provides these disciplines with the means to test hypotheses by using robots as research tools. Outside the lab, the main market today for robots is moving away from industry robots to the home, with robotic companions being developed for entertainment purposes. As hardware costs are getting smaller and smaller, the same development that happened several years ago with personal computers can now be applied to personal robots. A new trend is to modify existing commercially available robots and add new functionalities (also called `robot hacking'). These different approaches will be presented, and their implications for the future of robotics will be discussed.
Tags: robots research future verena-hafner chaos-communication-congress future-of-robotics cutting-edge-research
21:36
[Slides] Robots for fun and research
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Verena Hafner
Tags: robotics
Event: Chaos Communication Congress 22th (22C3) 2005
Abstract: In this talk, several examples of cutting-edge research in robotics will be presented, and their implications for the future of robotics will be discussed. Robots will play an increasingly important role in the development of Artificial Intelligence. Many researchers are convinced that for machines to become truly intelligent, they will need to be embodied. Contemporary research in intelligent robotics does not only draw inspiration from biology and psychology, but also provides these disciplines with the means to test hypotheses by using robots as research tools. Outside the lab, the main market today for robots is moving away from industry robots to the home, with robotic companions being developed for entertainment purposes. As hardware costs are getting smaller and smaller, the same development that happened several years ago with personal computers can now be applied to personal robots. A new trend is to modify existing commercially available robots and add new functionalities (also called `robot hacking'). These different approaches will be presented, and their implications for the future of robotics will be discussed.
Tags: robots research future verena-hafner chaos-communication-congress future-of-robotics cutting-edge-research
21:36
[Audio] Robots for fun and research
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Verena Hafner
Tags: robotics
Event: Chaos Communication Congress 22th (22C3) 2005
Abstract: In this talk, several examples of cutting-edge research in robotics will be presented, and their implications for the future of robotics will be discussed. Robots will play an increasingly important role in the development of Artificial Intelligence. Many researchers are convinced that for machines to become truly intelligent, they will need to be embodied. Contemporary research in intelligent robotics does not only draw inspiration from biology and psychology, but also provides these disciplines with the means to test hypotheses by using robots as research tools. Outside the lab, the main market today for robots is moving away from industry robots to the home, with robotic companions being developed for entertainment purposes. As hardware costs are getting smaller and smaller, the same development that happened several years ago with personal computers can now be applied to personal robots. A new trend is to modify existing commercially available robots and add new functionalities (also called `robot hacking'). These different approaches will be presented, and their implications for the future of robotics will be discussed.
Tags: robots research future verena-hafner chaos-communication-congress future-of-robotics cutting-edge-research

September 10, 2012
10:01
humanoid Robot Kinects with its enviroment
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Malte Ahlers] from Germany, After having completed a PhD in neurobiology, decided to build a human sized humanoid robot torso. [Malte] has an interest in robotics and wanted to show case some of his skills.The project is still in its early development but as you will see in the video he has achieved a nice build so [...]
Tags: humanoid robot kinects germany malte ahlers humanoid-robot torso robots hacks
6:55
Sexy six axis robotic arm is a work of art
» ‎ Hack a Day

We don’t know if it’s a mid-life crisis or just the result of way too many solder fumes, but [sparten11] on Instructables is building one of the coolest robotic arm we’ve ever seen, and we thank him for that. The build began with a set of brushed DC motors running capable of running on 60 [...]
Tags: ARM work sexy mid-life-crisis solder-fumes robotic-arm robots hacks
September 09, 2012
7:01
Wireless Upgrade for a Heathkit HERO 1 Robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

For those of you that don’t know, the Heathkit HERO (Heathkit Educational Robot) was a ‘bot built in the early 1980s. [Rick] wasn’t satisfied with his model ETW-18′s programming interface, so decided to upgrade it to be able to run Python using a hacked wireless router. We’d agree that things have advanced since then, since [...]
Tags: heathkit Wireless robot rick hero heathkit-hero educational-robot s-programming robots hacks
September 07, 2012
13:01
Cheetah robot can run down even the fastest of us
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s a blur, but you really don’t want to seen this thing coming for you anyway. It’s the latest look at what the folks at Boston Dynamics have been working on under a DARPA contract. They call it the Cheetah robot as it’s the fastest four-legged bot ever developed. The clip after the break shows [...]
Tags: thing robot cheetah boston darpa-contract boston-dynamics robots hacks
September 03, 2012
12:01
Steam-powered hexapod
» ‎ Hack a Day

This all-mechanical hexapod (translated) was meticulously planned and beautifully constructed. It’s not craning its neck to see what’s ahead. That’s a smoke stack for the steam engine which propels the machine. Mechanically the legs were the hardest part. That’s only because the steam engine was not built from scratch. It’s a Wilesco D14 which is powered [...]
Tags: steam hexapod engine smoke-stack steam-engine d14 robots hacks
August 30, 2012
10:06
Can a Kickstarter project actually build a space elevator?
» ‎ Hack a Day

It’s the stuff that Science Fiction is made of: an elevator that climbs its way into space rather than needing a rocket to get there. Can it be done? No. But this Kickstarter project aims to fund research that will eventually make a space elevator possible. They’re already way over their goal, and plan to [...]
Tags: space kickstarter elevator space-elevator science-fiction robots hacks
August 28, 2012
8:01
Soft robots given veins the let them change their stripes
» ‎ Hack a Day

If it were alive this robot would be classified as an invertebrate. It lacks a backbone and interestingly enough, all other bones are missing as well. The Harvard researchers that developed it call it a soft robot. It’s made out of silicone and uses pathways built into the substance to move. By adding pressurized air to [...]
Tags: robot soft invertebrate harvard-researchers silicone veins robots hacks
August 26, 2012
10:01
Recreating [Phillip K. Dick] in android form… and losing his head
» ‎ Hack a Day

Yes, that’s an android of [Phillip K. Dick]. While you don’t necessarily need to be familir with [Phillip K. Dick] to find this story amusing, we highly recommend that you take a few minutes to learn about him if you don’t recognize the name. [Phillip K. Dick], or [PKD] was a science fiction author and [...]
Tags: recreating form android phillip-k.-dick phillip-k-dick science-fiction-author pkd robots hacks
August 21, 2012
5:30
Eradicating invasive species with quadcopters
» ‎ Hack a Day

That right there is Sydney Golden Wattle, a fast-growing invasive species native to Eastern Australia that has the possibility of covering 20 percent of the bushland in Western Australia by the year 2020. [John Moore], a researcher at the Department of Food and Agriculture, wants to put an end to this infestation by destroying large swaths of [...]
Tags: eradicating right golden john-moore sydney eastern-australia western-australia invasive-species bushland robots hacks
August 20, 2012
12:30
High voltage ROV adventures
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Eirik] wrote in to share the build log for the third iteration of his underwater ROV. The first two project were completed and tested (you may remember reading about it back in January), but both had issues that caused general failure. Most notably, the introduction of water where he didn’t want it. But this time [...]
Tags: eirik rov voltage introduction-of-water underwater-rov third-iteration robots hacks
August 17, 2012
16:30
Water glider prototype
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Byrel Mitchell] wrote in to share some details on this water glider which he has been working on with his classmates at the Nonlinear Autonomous Systems lab of Michigan Technological University. As its name implies, it glides through the water rather than using propulsion systems typically found on underwater ROVs. The wings on either side of the [...]
Tags: water prototype glider mitchell underwater-rovs michigan-technological-university propulsion-systems robots hacks
August 16, 2012
14:01
Autonomous fixed-wing drone threads the needled in a parking garage
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve got something of a love affair going on with quadcopters, but there’s still room for a little something on the side. This fixed-wing drone can pull off some pretty amazing navigation. MIT’s Robust Robotics Group is showing off the work they’ve done with the plane, culminating in a death-defying flight through a parking garage [...]
Tags: something drone parking little-something-on-the-side robotics-group parking-garage robots hacks
August 14, 2012
17:01
LEGO ROV without a tether
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Brane] built an underwater ROV from LEGO mindstorm parts. Look closely at this image and you should notice something missing. The tether that normally carries power and control lines from an ROV to the surface is missing. This is a wireless solution that lets him control the device using an Xbox controller. The video after [...]
Tags: lego rov tether lego-mindstorm underwater-rov xbox-controller robots hacks
August 13, 2012
10:01
Roomba 4000 teardown ready for your Doomba build
» ‎ Hack a Day

In addition to getting a haircut, [Dino] spent his week editing an old video of him tearing down a Roomba 4000. These robots can be picked up for just a few dollars on eBay, making them one of the cheapest bodged up robotics dev platforms available. After [Dino] goes over how to unscrew the cover [...]
Tags: teardown roomba doomba dino ebay haircut robots hacks
August 10, 2012
10:01
‘Vortex-drive’ for underwater ROV propulsion
» ‎ Hack a Day

This is [Lee von Kraus'] new experimental propulsion system for an underwater ROV. He developed the concept when considering how one might adapt the Bristlebot, which uses vibration to shimmy across a solid surface, for use under water. As with its dry-land relative, this technique uses a tiny pager motor. The device is designed to vibrate [...]
Tags: rov vortex-drive propulsion lee-von-kraus propulsion-system pager-motor solid-surface robots hacks
August 09, 2012
14:01
Robotic hand with haptic feedback
» ‎ Hack a Day

While I was at Heatsync Labs in Mesa Arizona, [Nate] mentioned that he was really proud of helping someone build a robotic hand. I have tracked down that project because it looked pretty cool. [Macguyver603] built this robotic hand that is controlled by a glove with flex sensors. He was originally going to 3d print [...]
Tags: robotic feedback hand nate arizona flex-sensors robotic-hand mesa-arizona robots hacks
August 06, 2012
5:01
biological-inspired robotic eye movements
» ‎ Hack a Day

Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a biologically inspired system to control cameras on board robots that simulate the Saccadic optokinetic system of the human eye. Its similarity to the muscular system of the human eye is uncanny. Joshua Schultz, a Ph.D candidate, says that this system has been made possible in part to piezoelectric [...]
Tags: eye georgia system joshua-schultz muscular-system eye-movements human-eye robots hacks
August 03, 2012
5:05
Robotic Manta Ray (Mantabot)
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Robotic Manta Ray codenamed MantaBot created by the Bio-Inspired Engineering Research Laboratory (BIER Lab) is set to make a splash. The next evolution in underwater Robotics is here. We have seen the likes of robotic fish and Jelly fish now to be added to the school is the MantaBot which has been designed to mimic [...]
Tags: manta robotic mantabot ray underwater-robotics robotic-fish jelly-fish robots hacks
July 31, 2012
5:01
A Large Hexapod Made of Wood and PVC Pipe
» ‎ Hack a Day

Although not the biggest hexapod walker we’ve seen by any means, this one is nonetheless worth a mention. Made with windshield wiper motors, PVC pipe, and lots of wood, it’s still a good size ‘bot. It’s a work in progress, but check out the video of it’s legs being tested as well as one of [...]
Tags: pvc pipe hexapod wood windshield-wiper-motors pvc-pipe robots hacks
July 27, 2012
10:01
Drawbot software aims to do it better than the rest
» ‎ Hack a Day

There are plenty of drawbot projects out there, many of which come with their own special software in tow. While some of these packages are easier to use than others, [Dan Royer] is pretty sure he can do it better. Looking for a fun and engaging way to teach STEM subjects in schools across the [...]
Tags: rest Software drawbot dan-royer better-than-the-rest special-software royer robots hacks
July 24, 2012
12:47
Shakey robot plays Angry Birds
» ‎ Hack a Day

At this year’s Pycon [Jason Huggins] gave a talk about his Angry Birds playing robot. He built a delta robot which includes a pen actuator for controlling a capacitive touch screen. The video after the break starts with a demo of the bot beating a level of Angry Birds on the iPad. The idea behind [...]
Tags: birds robot angry jason-huggins capacitive-touch-screen pycon ipad robots hacks
July 20, 2012
13:01
Self balancing robot uses cascading PID algorithms
» ‎ Hack a Day

At this point we’re beginning to think that building a self-balancing robot is one of the rights of passage alongside blinking some LEDs and writing Hello World on an LCD screen. We’re not saying it’s easy to pull off a build like this one. But the project makes you learn a lot about a wide [...]
Tags: robot self pid rights-of-passage lcd-screen hello-world robots hacks
10:01
Building an autonomous robot from an Xbox 360 controller
» ‎ Hack a Day

Wow, it’s amazing what [Carl] was able to build using an Xbox 360 control PCB as the base for his robot. His forum posts just touches the surface of the build, but he linked to a PDF file which has the full details. This build basically attaches sensors and replacement motors to the controller board… [...]
Tags: controller robot xbox carl autonomous-robot controller-board xbox-360 robots hacks
July 19, 2012
15:07
RC PVC bot
» ‎ Hack a Day

This hunk of PVC pipe is radio controlled. The wheels on the ends provide the locomotion, but it wouldn’t be going anywhere if it weren’t for that little tail strapped to the center of the tube. When the motors are turning the body of the bot needs something to push against. In this case the [...]
Tags: pvc bot hunk pvc-pipe locomotion robots hacks
July 03, 2012
10:01
[Dino] upgrades his robot chassis
» ‎ Hack a Day

This is the fourth iteration that [Dino] has produced for his all-terrain robot. Just before this it was more of a turtle, with an aluminum pan shell. We think his upgrade to MicroRAX frame parts makes it look a lot better, and lightens the load so it can get around better as well. It’s hard [...]
Tags: iteration robot chassis dino robot-chassis aluminum-pan robots hacks
4:01
Automated system hopes to make manual road patching a thing of the past
» ‎ Hack a Day

You don’t necessarily have to live in a cold climate to experience how roads start to deteriorate once cracks begin forming in the asphalt surface. Even more frustrating than the potholes, dips, and road erosion is the snarled traffic that results from closing lanes to repair them. Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute have [...]
Tags: automated road system road-erosion georgia-tech-research-institute georgia-tech-research robots hacks
June 29, 2012
16:01
Robot dares you to snatch the pebble from this flower
» ‎ Hack a Day

This pleasant-looking plant may try to take your hand off if you’re not careful. The robot flower (translated) includes sensors that cause the petals to move in reaction to external stimuli. You can just make out the distance sensors as black rectangles on two of the petals. These let the flower track an object by rotating the [...]
Tags: flower robot plant external-stimuli rectangles petals robots hacks
10:01
Self balancer does it differently than we’re used to seeing
» ‎ Hack a Day

This self balancing robot still uses just two wheels, but it’s balancing very differently than we’re used to seeing. Where most of the projects use a form factor that’s similar to a Segway, this works just like a bicycle. But it doesn’t need to keep the front and rear wheels spinning to stay upright. In [...]
Tags: balancer robot self rear-wheels two-wheels segway robots hacks
5:17
MakerFaire K.C.: Hexy, the $200 hexapod project
» ‎ Hack a Day

I’ve always loved hexapods. Unfortunately, the cost to play with them can be rather daunting. Hexy is seeking to make a decent impact on that by being only $200. Yep, that $200 includes everything but the computer. You get the entire chassis, micro controller, servos, sensors, batteries, etc. I ran into [Joe] from arcbotics showing [...]
Tags: hexapod hexy makerfaire joe k.c hexapod-project micro-controller robots hacks
June 28, 2012
13:01
Quadrotor opera begs for lasers and Pink Floyd
» ‎ Hack a Day

In case quadrocopters aren’t cool enough, here’s an orchestrated quadrotor light show that was shown at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this last week. With 16 quadrotors and a few can lights, it’s a light show not to be missed. This quadrotor show was created by a collaboration between KMel robotics and Marshmallow Laser Feast. The [...]
Tags: opera show quadrotor floyd cannes-lions lions-international kmel robots hacks
10:01
Building a pick and place with 3D printed parts
» ‎ Hack a Day

For the last few months, [HeliumFrog] has been building a SCARA bot to serve as the basis for a pick and place machine. Somewhat amazingly, this is the first robot of its kind to be printed on a 3D printer. A SCARA-type robot is an articulated arm perfectly suited for transferring components from tubes and reels [...]
Tags: robot pick heliumfrog type-robot pick-and-place-machine 3d-printer robots hacks
7:01
DIY ROV explores the watery depths
» ‎ Hack a Day

This rig looks so good it’s hard to believe this is the first ROV that [DZL] has ever built. It houses an HD camera which feeds the display at the operator’s station. You can see the controller to the left of that screen which uses a joystick and buttons to pilot the underwater vessel. In [...]
Tags: rov rig diy hd-camera joystick robots hacks
June 27, 2012
14:04
Robotic rock-paper-scissors never lets you win
» ‎ Hack a Day

So robots kick our butts at tic-tac-toe, chess, Jeopardy, and now they’re the dominant species at rock-paper-scissors too. This robot arm will outmatch your at the game every single time. It’s not just fast enough to keep up, but it figures out what you’re planning to do and reacts according. All of this happens way [...]
Tags: chess robotic jeopardy rock-paper-scissors robot-arm dominant-species robots hacks
June 25, 2012
15:01
Printing and programming a self-balancer
» ‎ Hack a Day

The Hackaday staff isn’t in agreement on 3d printers. Some of us are very enthusiastic, some are indifferent, and some wonder what if they’re as widely useful as the hype makes them sound. But we think [Jason Dorweiler's] self balancing robot is as strong a case as any that 3d printing should be for everyone! Don’t [...]
Tags: dorweiler hype robot robots hacks
June 20, 2012
7:01
Cramming for Sparkfun’s Autonomous Vehicle Competition
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Paul Breed] participated in this year’s Autonomous Vehicles Contest put on by SparkFun Electronics. As with most projects, the deadline really snuck up on him and he ended up cramming a bunch of code development into the waning days before the competition. His experiences are shared in this recent blog post. One big part of [...]
Tags: competition sparkfun autonomous paul-breed autonomous-vehicle autonomous-vehicles robots hacks

June 16, 2012
7:01
[Audio] Beyond Asimov - Laws for Robots
» ‎ SecDocs

Authors: Frank Rieger
Tags: engineering
Event: Chaos Communication Congress 25th (25C3) 2008
Abstract: Robotic systems become more and more autonomous, and telepresence develops very rapidly. But what happens if things go wrong? Who is responsible for that autonomous cleaning car murdering tourists? How can you identify the owner of that spy-drone filming you naked at the pool? This talk outlines some ideas to trigger a debate on how to deal with these problems, without stifling innovation and fun.
Tags: robots audio asimov laws frank-rieger chaos-communication-congress robotic-systems

June 15, 2012
10:01
Jamming gripper that’s super easy to build
» ‎ Hack a Day

This is the simplest version of a jamming gripper that we’ve seen yet. The only component that might not be readily available is the pump in the upper left, but the rest is all hardware or grocery store stuff. It’s based on the concept we saw from a research video where the air in a bladder [...]
Tags: version jamming gripper grocery-store bladder robots hacks
June 13, 2012
9:01
Two motor walking robot with a TI Launchpad
» ‎ Hack a Day

Last month, [Vinod] bought a pair of hobby servos on a whim. These servos sat on the shelf for a while until [Vinod] asked his friend what he should use them for. [Achu] suggested using the servos for a walking robot, so after checking out a few YouTube videos of some servo-powered walkers, [Vinod] built [...]
Tags: launchpad robot motor vinod hobby-servos walking-robot robots hacks
June 11, 2012
12:01
Swumanoid: a swimming humanoid robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you just happen to find yourself at the Fifth International Symposium on Aero Aqua Bio-Mechanisms this August in Taipei, you might get a chance to see this half sized swimming humanoid. Swumanoid was created by researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology by doing a 3d scan of a human, then simplifying the shapes [...]
Tags: swumanoid swimming humanoid taipei fifth-international-symposium tokyo-institute-of-technology 3d-scan robots hacks
June 10, 2012
8:01
Pingbot: adorable and fully documented
» ‎ Hack a Day

After building many functional but somewhat unfinished looking bots, [Tomdf] really wanted to produce something that felt “complete”. Pingbot is the result and here’s how [Tomdf] describes it: Pingbot is a very small (38mm diameter), usb rechargeable, programmable, musical, remote control robot designed for maximum fun and danceability. Though I wasn’t inclined to dance I [...]
Tags: tomdf building pingbot remote-control diameter robot robots hacks
6:01
Batbot: Building a functionally correct bat wing robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

Batbot is a project wherein the researchers are attempting to mimic the biological structure of a bat wing for flight. The desire is to attain the maneuverability and agility you see in bat flight due to the ever changing shape of their wings. Also, bats look really cool. In attempting to mimic the structure, they [...]
Tags: bat batbot wing bat-flight changing-shape bat-wing robots hacks
June 09, 2012
11:01
InMoov: a 3d printed animatronic hand you can download
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Hairygael] has been hard at work designing and building this robot structure that can be completely 3d printed. He’s admittedly not a big electronics person, so most of his focus has been on the design and construction of the bot frame. So far, he as a fully 3d printable (and available for download) hand that [...]
Tags: download inmoov hand robot-structure design-and-construction robots hacks
June 07, 2012
12:01
Shakerbot leverages inertial for locomotion
» ‎ Hack a Day

This robot uses the concept of a snakeboard for getting around. [Sevag Babikian] built the project, and has gone out of his way to explain how it works. We’d recommend skimming over his explanation, but it was the video after the break that made all things clear to us. There is a large fly-wheel at [...]
Tags: shakerbot locomotion inertial fly-wheel snakeboard robot robots hacks
June 02, 2012
8:01
[Easton's] robot arm takes 2nd place in the International Science and Engineering Fair
» ‎ Hack a Day

Here we see [Easton LaChappelle] getting a congratulatory handshake from the robotic arm he built. This project is aimed at human prosthetics, and we’re happy to report that [Easton] won second place in Electrical and Mechanical engineering division of this year’s International Science and Engineering Fair (PDF listing the winners). In the video he gives [...]
Tags: ARM easton engineering robot-arm international-science robotic-arm robots hacks
6:00
Shoulder robot for the forever alone
» ‎ Hack a Day

Don’t have anyone to share activities with? Forget Siri, she’s just a disembodied voice in a box. You need to get yourself a shoulder-mounted robot pal. The idea behind this design actually has something to do with telepresence. Let’s say you and your best friend want to go check out the local Hackerspace. The problem is [...]
Tags: robot anyone shoulder don robot-pal share-activities disembodied-voice robots hacks
May 31, 2012
15:01
Robot arm provides haptic feedback from the virtual world
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Diego] wrote in to let us know about the haptic feedback arm project with which he’s hard at work. He calls it the Vimphin, which is uses the beginning letters from the words: Virtual Manipulator Physical Interface. Instead of a claw, the robot arm has a hand grip that lets you easily move it around. [...]
Tags: ARM robot feedback diego robot-arm arm-project physical-interface robots hacks
May 30, 2012
11:01
CalTech’s manipulator-arm equipped robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Justin] wrote in to tell us about the rover which his CalTech team has entered in NASA’s Exploration Robo-Ops Competition. Their time to shine is later this week, but you can see some of the test footage after the break. The operator pictured above is using a controller which is a scale model of the manipulator [...]
Tags: caltech-team manipulator-arm test-footage robots hacks
May 29, 2012
8:00
Climbing robot glues it’s own feet to the wall
» ‎ Hack a Day

The problem of gripping all surfaces has always plagued the field of climbing robotics. But if you don’t care about damaging the wall, why not just let the robot glue its feet to the surface. That’s exactly how this robot does it, using a couple of climbing feet in conjunction with a hot melt glue [...]
Tags: wall robot glue hot-melt-glue glues robots hacks
May 26, 2012
8:01
Robot fish detect pollutants
» ‎ Hack a Day

If you happen to visit the Spanish port of Gijon, you may notice some giant yellow robotic fish swimming around. These 5 foot long swimmers are part of a proposed sensor network to detect pollutants in the water. Equipped with an array of sensors, the fish can test for general water quality, or swap out [...]
Tags: fish robot water robot-fish robotic-fish spanish-port robots hacks
May 23, 2012
16:01
Robotic falconry: winged unit lands on you!
» ‎ Hack a Day

It doesn’t have four rotors, but this advanced-glider is every bit as impressive as the most complicated of quadrotor offerings. It’s the first glider that can successfully perch on your arm. We can’t help but think back to the owl in the original Clash of the Titans movie. The team at the Aerospace Robotics and Control [...]
Tags: falconry robotic unit clash-of-the-titans clash-of-the-titans-movie glider robots hacks
11:01
Telepresence robot lets you play a hand of cards
» ‎ Hack a Day

Virtual card games proliferate the interwebs, but this card-playing telepresence device is unique. [Patrick] calls the project Vanna, and we’d bet that’s an homage to the tile-flipping TV star [Vanna White]. Much like she flips the blank tiles to reveal letters, this device can flip the hand of cards either face up or face down. [...]
Tags: blank-tiles vanna-white interwebs robots hacks
4:01
Hot glue appendages may be predecessor to the flow metal of the T-1000
» ‎ Hack a Day

The T-1000 was the shape-shifting robot from T2 (the second Terminator movie). It was so amazing because it could assume the form and texture of anything; humans, piercing weapons, inanimate objects. This robot doesn’t even compare, except for one small trait. When it needs a tool, it can build it as its own appendage. This [...]
Tags: robot glue predecessor hot-glue inanimate-objects appendage robots hacks
May 18, 2012
12:01
How to build a competitive battle robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

Ever wonder what’s under the hood with a competitive battle robot like this one? It’s usually a big secret as teams don’t care to give their competition any help. But [AlexHrn] decided not only to give us a peek, but also shows us his step-by-step build process for Phoenix, the 30 pound flipping battle robot. [...]
Tags: robot wonder battle phoenix peek robots hacks
6:01
A rocking and walking BEAM robot
» ‎ Hack a Day

We’ve seen a few minimalist robots in our time, but very few compare to [Thomas Rinsma]‘s amazingly agile BEAM robot. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch this little robot crawl around on its circular legs. BEAM robots are extremely simple robots built without a microcontroller of any kind. The idea that extremely simple circuits built from logic chips and amplifiers came [...]
Tags: beam-robot beam-robots logic-chips robots hacks
May 17, 2012
15:01
Retrotechtacular: Shakey shows off robotics innovation from 1972
» ‎ Hack a Day

In this installement of Retrotechtacular we’re taking a look at Shakey, a robot developed between 1966 and 1972 at the Stanford Reserach Lab. This was a glorious time when students had long hair but still wore long sleeves and ties to do their research. The robot is actually communicating wirelessly with the PDP-10 computer which [...]
Tags: retrotechtacular shakey robot glorious-time wirelessly robots hacks
13:01
Cheap wooden hexapod frame greatly reduces cost
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Balline] really wanted to play with a hexapod but found the cost to be prohibitive. Being a mechanical engineer, he was able to fairly quickly come up with a stable 3 servo design that would allow him to experiment with the platform. He chose to use wood as the construction material to help reduce costs [...]
Tags: hexapod frame balline servo-design mechanical-engineer construction-material robots hacks
11:01
Snake-like robot can roll around in a ring
» ‎ Hack a Day

A lot of 3D printing and a many servo motors went into this snake-like robot, and it’s only about half of what [Toby Baumgartner] plans to accomplish. In this orientation the snake is rolled into a circle, and apparently some special movements in the segments allow it to roll around like this. He compares it [...]
Tags: robot snake-like ring toby-baumgartner baumgartner snake robots hacks
May 15, 2012
13:01
Floating sensor networks
» ‎ Hack a Day

These cool looking little bots are part of a fleet of floating water sensors built by The Lagrangian Sensor Systems Laboratory (LSSL) at UC Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LBNL) and the California Department of Water Resources. In an emergency such as a levee break, flood, or spill, they can be deployed to gather information [...]
Tags: cool water sensor berkeley california-department-of-water-resources water-sensors uc-berkeley robots hacks
May 12, 2012
8:01
Pipe crawling snake robot is a masterpiece of a senior project
» ‎ Hack a Day

Here’s an oldie but a goodie: [Eiki], [Mark], and [Sheraz] built a pipe crawling robot for their senior engineering project at Florida Atlantic University way back in 2004. Despite being a rather old build, its aged well and still demonstrates the clever ways the guys overcame some engineering obstacles. The original plan for the pipe [...]
Tags: robot pipe project sheraz mark snake-robot florida-atlantic-university robots hacks
May 10, 2012
16:01
Project Octopus
» ‎ Hack a Day

You know who thinks building a robotic octopus is an awesome idea? EVERYONE. Apparently the idea is a solid enough idea that the European Commision has funded this project. The goal is to mimic the capabilities of the squishiest of the cephalopods in order to advance soft robotics. Or possibly to take over the world. [...]
Tags: project idea octopus project-octopus awesome-idea cephalopods robots hacks
May 08, 2012
11:01
There’s more than meets the eye to this robot car
» ‎ Hack a Day

This is a robot that any Transformers enthusiast will love. Sure, the car looks just a bit boxy, but you’ll forget all about that when you see it unfold into a bipedal robot (translated). [Zak Sawa] is responsible for the creation. He pull off the build using 22 servo motors which let the car transform, and [...]
Tags: eye robot car zak-sawa bipedal-robot robot-car sawa robots hacks
May 04, 2012
17:01
[Jaimie's] Giant Hexapod project
» ‎ Hack a Day

Warning, this may be a duplicate post. We all agree we’ve seen this before, but can’t find it in our archive. If it is, sorry. If it isn’t enjoy one of the most awesome projects we’ve seen in a long time. Meet [Jaimie Mantzel] an eccentric, and very hyper, individual. He’s done many projects, but [...]
Tags: hexapod-project awesome-projects jaimie robots hacks
May 03, 2012
5:01
Meet Stompy, your new robotic overlord
» ‎ Hack a Day

In case you weren’t already depressed about not starting a summer project already, a couple of guys are building a gigantic rideable hexapod they call Stompy. The project leaders, [Gui Cavalcanti], [Dan Cody], and [James Whong] have worked on a few crazy robotics projects before like PETMAN and BigDog. Stompy won’t be a military-backed project like the [...]
Tags: robotics-projects rideable bigdog robots hacks
April 26, 2012
5:01
Micro Arduino bot skitters its way into our hearts.
» ‎ Hack a Day

Here’s a quick and easy little robot with a not-so-pint-sized brain. [Dikos] over at grobot, slapped together some gutted micro servos, an Arduino pro mini, H bridge chip, and a solar key-chain charger to make this little three wheeled cutie. The robot boasts some very simple object avoidance thanks to the Sharp GP2Y0A21YK analog IR [...]
Tags: robot arduino micro object-avoidance h-bridge dikos robots hacks
April 24, 2012
12:01
Climbing the mountain of quadcopter design
» ‎ Hack a Day

What a sweet thing it is to see the first outdoor flight of a quadcopter. [Botched] has done a wonderful job of documenting the entire build process. Take a look at all that he has done, then jump after the break to see the extremely stable test flight footage. Earlier iterations used feedback electronics that [...]
Tags: quadcopter climbing flight outdoor-flight feedback-electronics climbing-the-mountain robots hacks
April 23, 2012
14:01
Cardboard hexapod gets around with three motors
» ‎ Hack a Day

Here’s a lesson in doing a lot with very little. [Oldrobot] built this hexapod using cardboard for most of the pieces. He still had the box from his vacuum clear and it just happened to have a large black area the makes the top of the beetle look like it’s been painted. The control board [...]
Tags: hexapod cardboard lesson vacuum robots hacks
April 22, 2012
6:01
Sassy disco bots of the 80s
» ‎ Hack a Day

Surely, this is a glimpse into the future. No? Ok, its a glimpse into 1983. A small chinese fast-food restaurant in California put two 4.5 foot tall, 180 pound robots to work delivering food. Tanbo R-1 and Tanbo R-2 were their names and delivering food was their game. At least, when there wasn’t radio interference [...]
Tags: glimpse food tanbo california fast-food-restaurant radio-interference robots hacks
April 18, 2012
11:01
Robotic whiteboard writes your wall on the wall
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Dave's] drawbot writes his Facebook wall messages on a whiteboard. The setup is pretty simple, depending on a pair of stepper motors and common household goods. As you can see in the image, the stylus is a plain old dry-erase marker held by a big spring clip (the kind that holds a stack of papers [...]
Tags: wall robotic whiteboard dave dry-erase-marker household-goods spring-clip robots hacks
April 03, 2012
7:01
Working Tachikoma brings the manga to life
» ‎ Hack a Day

This Lego Tachikoma drives and walks just like in the TV program. You simply must take a peek at the video after the break. We’ve watched it several times and don’t think there’s any editing magic going on. But the movements are so intriguing part of us thinks there’s something fishy about it. Each leg [...]
Tags: tachikoma something-fishy tv-program robots hacks
April 02, 2012
14:01
Sphere morphing hexabot now rolls around
» ‎ Hack a Day

[Zenta] has been building his MorpHex rolling hexapod for nearly a year now, and good things come to those who wait. After a ton of development and fabrication, [Zenta] finally has his mechanical jellyfish robot rolling and walking around. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen [Zenta]‘s MorpHex robot in action. A year ago, we saw the [...]
Tags: zenta robot morphex hexapod jellyfish robots hacks
April 01, 2012
10:01
Powering a robot with a macbook battery
» ‎ Hack a Day

When [Soo-Hyun]‘s friend had an Apple Macbook Pro battery that began to swell, his friend did the reasonable thing and donated it to be used in a robot. Now [Soo-Hyun]‘s kiwi drive robot is powered by a gigantic LiPo battery, giving it a huge range and a very fast top speed. The defunct laptop battery [...]
Tags: robot battery hyun apple-macbook drive-robot laptop-battery robots hacks
March 31, 2012
12:06
Sand Flea literally leaps tall buildings in a single bound
» ‎ Hack a Day

The hidden abilities of this robot that is no larger than a dinner plate are quite impressive. It doesn’t let an obstacle like a building get in its way. The Sand Flea, like its namesake, posses a remarkable jumping ability. When it encounters a tall obstruction two levers incline the front of the robot and [...]
Tags: hidden-abilities sand-flea dinner-plate robots hacks