Autonomous helicopter works like a Wii remote

autonomous-ir-helicopter

[Jack Crossfire] took one of those inexpensive indoor helicopters and made it autonomous. He didn’t replace the hardware used for the helicopter, but augmented it and patched into the remote control to make a base station.

The position feedback is provided in much the same way that the Wii remote is used as a pointing device. On the gaming … Read the rest

Toorcamp: MC Hawking Robotic Wheelchair

This is the MC Hawking robot built by the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco. It’s a robotic electric wheelchair outfitted with a PC, an XBox Kinect, and an Arduino. On the software side, it uses Ubuntu and the open source ROS platform. A few folks from Noisebridge were hacking away on the robot at Toorcamp to add a robotic arm … Read the rest

Arduino rover evolves to a trike design

[Eduard Ros] wrote in to show off the latest version of his Arduino powered autonomous rover (translated). You may remember seeing the first version of the build back in June. It started with a remote control truck body, adding an Arduino and some ultrasonic sensors for obstacle avoidance.

The two big wheels and the pair of sensors … Read the rest

Arduino rover doubles up on obstacle avoidance

[Eduard Ros] wrote in show off his first attempt at building an autonomous rover (translated). As with many of these projects, he started with the base of a remote control toy truck. This solves so many mechanical issues, like steering, locomotion, and power source.

He just needed a way to control the vehicle. The recent LayerOne badge hacksRead the rest

Self-stabilizing autonomous bicycle

For [Gunnar]‘s diploma thesis, he wanted to build an autonomous bicycle. There’s an obvious problem with this idea, though: how, exactly does a robotic bicycle stand upright? His solution to balancing the bicycle was a reaction wheel that keeps the bicycle upright at all times.

A bicycle is basically an inverted pendulum; something we’ve seen controlled in a number of Read the rest

The Pirate Bay aims for the clouds…literally

tpb

There is no shortage of government and entertainment-related agencies chomping at the bit to shut down the Pirate Bay for good. While the group has not suffered a permanent service ending raid like [Kim Dotcom] and the Megaupload crew, they are always thinking up novel ways to ensure that the site can endure whatever law enforcement throws at them.

In Read the rest

[Vijay Kumar's] TED talk on the state of quadcopter research

[Vijay Kumar] is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the GRASP lab where research centering around autonomous quadcopters is being met with great success. If you were intrigued by the video demonstrations seen over the last few years, you won’t want to miss the TED talk [Dr. Kumar] recently gave on the program’s research. … Read the rest