Meet Boxie. He’s a robot videographer with levels of interaction we haven’t seen outside an episode of Dora the Explorer. The project was conceived by [Alex] as his MIT thesis project to see if robots can use humans to make themselves more useful. All we know is Boxie is freaking adorable, as evidenced by this video.

The idea behind Boxie was inspired by Afghan Explorer to capture video in an attempt to tell a story. In the videos (after the break), Boxie wanders around the halls of MIT searching for people to help him (“can you carry me up the stairs?”) and tell stories (“what do you do here?”). It’s an experiment in autonomous documentary directorial skill that was edited down into a video that made sense.

[Alex] designed Boxie to be the cutest thing we’ve ever seen so he could elicit a response from the subjects of the documentary. We’re going to say the voice helped, but [Alex] also found the cardboard robot factor also played into the success. Boxie was originally planned to have a plastic skin, but [Alex]‘s friends thought it looked really creepy. They suggested that [Alex] go back to the prototype cardboard body. All we know is there’s a robot cuter than a Keepon, finally.

[Eric Gregori] recently spent some time messing around with a Hexbug Spider, and wrote in to share some modifications he made to the toy. In its unaltered form the robot can be controlled remotely, and while it’s fun to play with, the excitement is short lived. Using a TI MSP430 along with a small motor controller kit he put together, he gave the Hexbug a bit more personality.

The kit is really just a simple board used for mounting the MSP430 and FAN8200 motor driver, along with an IR emitter/sensor pair. It would be easy enough to put something similar together yourself, though if you are looking for a protoboard/deadbug/PCB etching-free solution, his Spider Hack kit is a quick and easy solution.

[Eric’s] walkthrough shows how to disassemble the Hexbug, and details which components need alterations before the controller board can be properly mounted. A few soldered wires later, the toy is ready to be reprogrammed, a process [Eric] carries out using the Launchpad board from which he lifted the MSP430.

As you can see in the videos below, calling the robot autonomous might be a bit of a stretch (I don’t see it walking to the kitchen to make me a sandwich), but it can navigate and avoid objects with ease.

Robots on four wheels are fun on their own merits, but one thing that most lack is the ability to see through walls.  With it’s onboard radar system, this bot is equipped to see objects that a person couldn’t normally detect on the other side of the wall.

Although some of the more “nuts and bolts” details of this build are missing, the robot uses an Ultra-Wideband Radar system called the [D1] Radar System. This system can, according to their documentation, “Avoid false positives caused by vapor, dust, smoke, rain or other small particles.” Apparently this means drywall as well if programmed correctly.

In the video after the break, the robot’s sensor package is programmed to ignore anything within 1.5 meters. This allows the robot to mirror the movement of the apparent shelving unit on the other side. This sensor could certainly have some interesting robotics applications besides imitating a rolling shelf, so we’re excited to see what it will be used for!

For a number of children born of geek parents, the WowWee Tribot is sure to make an appearance underneath a Christmas tree this year. By New Year’s, though, this toy will surely make its way to the back of a closet to sit unused until spring cleaning. It’s a shame to let such an interesting robotics platform go to waste, so [haltux] sent in a nice guide to unlocking the motor controller of this talking robot.

The ‘legs’ of the WowWee Tribot have three omnidirectional wheels mounted 120 degrees apart. We’ve seen this drive system before, so getting a pre-built platform out of the toy box is pretty interesting.

[haltux] found three H-bridges inside the Tribot and connected the direction and enable pins for each motor directly to an Arduino. The build was a success, and the new robot platform scurried along the floor. There are also rotary encoders on the Tribot, but these run at 12 Volts. [haltux] said he’ll cover these in a future post, and we’re waiting to see it.

This week, we are serving up part five in our series where we are using the Pololu 3pi robot as a fancy development board for the ATmega328p processor. This week we are taking a quick break from working with the perpherals specific to the processor and will show how to work with the 3pi’s line sensors. A quick look at the schematic for the 3pi might lead you to think that you should be reading the line sensors with the A2D peripheral. Even though they are wired to the A2D pins, they need to be read digitally. In the video, [Jack] will show how to read raw values from the sensors and then how to calibrate the results so that you can get a nice clean 8-bit value representing what the sensors are seeing. Of course, that would happen under normal circumstances. Murphy had his way in this video and it turned out that our studio lighting was interfering a bit with the sensor readings when we were shooting so we didn’t get as good of a calibration as we would have liked when we shot.

Video is after the break.

In case you have missed the previous videos here are some links:

Part 1: Setting up the development environment
Part 2: Basic I/O
Part 3: Pulse Width Modulation
Part 4: Analog to Digital conversion

[Eric] sent in his tutorial on building a Kinect based robot for $500, a low-cost solution to a wife that thinks her husband spends too much on robots.

For the base of his build, [Eric] used an iRobot Create, a derivative of the Roomba that is built exclusive for some hardware hackery. For command and control of the robot, an EEE netbook takes data from the Kinect and sends it to the iRobot over a serial connection.

The build itself is remarkably simple: two pieces of angle aluminum were attached to the iRobot, and a plastic milk crate was installed with zip ties. The Kinect sits on top of the plastic crate and the netbook comfortably fits inside.

A few weeks ago, [Eric] posted a summary of the history and open-source software for the Kinect that covers the development of the Libfreenect driver. [Eric] used this same driver for his robot. Currently, the robot is configured for two modes. The first mode has the robot travel to the furthest point from itself. The second mode instructs the robot to follow the closest thing to itself – walk in front of the robot and it becomes an ankle biter.

There is a limitation of the Kinect that [Eric] is trying to work around. Objects closer than 19 inches to the Kinect appear to be very far away. This caused a lot of wall bumping, but he plans on adding a few ultrasonic sensors to fill the gap in the sensor data. Not bad for a very inexpensive autonomous robot.

[Krash] had a lot of fun hacking up his Spy Gear TRAKR; we’re just lucky he was able to move a suspicious Shrek doll before it detonated.

The now discontinued Spy Gear TRAKR serves as the basis for [Krash]‘s build. This tiny remote-controlled toy transmits video back to its remote and makes us very jealous of the awesome toys our nephew has. Thankfully, the engineers behind the TRAKR made it extremely hackable, as proved by Hack A Day’s very own [Phil Burgess].

[Krash] began his build by putting a few male headers in the GPIO pins on the TRAKR’s board. After that, the TRAKR SDK was downloaded. He used a few Snap Circuits to verify his TRAKR software was working, then set off to build a Lego gripper arm. The arm is powered through an H-bridge IC [Krash] found alongside the rest of his Snap Circuits stuff.

Not a bad build for what amounts to a pile of toys. Check out [Krash]‘s video of his bomb disposal bot after the break.

In this week’s video, we continue on where we left off last week with another in our series of videos where we discuss how to program for the ATmega328p processor. This week, [Jack] takes a look at the analog to digital converter and takes us through how to set things up and then how to perform a conversion using the potentiometer on the 3pi as the analog source. Playing with potentiometers isn’t the most interesting thing in the world, but after watching this video, you will be able to do things like take light readings using a cadmium sulfide cell, read the weight applied to a sensor, calculate the temperature from a resistor and a thermistor, or interface with an analog gyroscope.

If you have missed our previous videos, here are some links:
Part 1: Setting up the development environment
Part 2: Basic I/O
Part 3: Pulse Width Modulation

Stay tuned for next week’s* video where we will take a look at how to interface with the 3pi’s line sensors.

Video is after the break…

* HAD is in the process of moving our secret headquarters so next week’s video may come some time later than next week.

You know we’re all going to starve, right? If the world’s population keeps growing exponentially and food production grows linearly, we’re eventually going to find out what Soylent Green is made of. This is where [David Dorhout]‘s Prospero robot farmer comes in. [David] has come up with the idea of using small autonomous robots to plant, tend and harvest fields. Right now, he’s working on stage 1: planting seeds.

A swarm of six-legged Prospero robots are dispatched to a field. There, each member of the swarm plants seeds one at a time. The robots keep in contact with each other over a wireless connection to ensure the optimal planting pattern for an entire field.

The Prospero prototype is based on the Parallax Propeller with a Ping ultrasonic sensor used to avoid obstacles. Each hexapod is equipped with a bunch of seeds, a small auger, and a supply of fertilizer for the future corn plant. The next step in the plan is to build a ‘tending’ robot that will monitor and apply nutrients if needed. Check out the Prospero video after the break.

The creation you see above is the work of art student [Daniel Bertner] who is wrapping up his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He calls the incredibly intriguing, yet somewhat disturbing device “TIM”, which is short for Tracking Interactive Mechanism.

A culmination of different projects he has tinkered with over the last year or so, TIM is an interactive delta bot with an attitude. Mounted on the wall of the Art Institute’s Sullivan Galleries, TIM is as interested in you as you are in it. While passers by investigate the curious device, it watches them back, following their every movement.

The robot’s motors are controlled using an Arduino, and its ability to track people standing nearby is provided via a video stream processed with Open CV.

It really is a cool project, and we think it would make for an awesome prop in some sci-fi horror flick. Check out the video below to see TIM’s personality in action – he doesn’t like it when people stand too close!

[Chris Williamson] designed the Rave Rover, a mobile disco floor with integrated stripper pole for this year’s DragonCon.

[Chris] started building combat robots back in 2000 for Battlebots and Robot Wars and cofounded the South Eastern Combat Robot league. He’s a lover and not a fighter, so for the DragonCon robotics track [Chris] built his mobile dance party. He put up an Instructable of his build and some of the features are really clever. Whenever the dance floor is being ‘used’, pneumatic cylinders lower the disco floor so it rests directly on the ground. A good idea, especially considering what we imagine happens on the Rave Rover.

For the light-up disco floor, [Chris] cut black ABS sheets on a CNC router and installed RGB LED modules controlled by an Arduino. The floor can display low-res animations, but random patterns look just a cool.

The Rave Rover was designed and built over a one month span to get ready in time for DragonCon. The build was a little hurried but the quality is still there. Check out video of the Rave Rover at DragonCon after the break.

If you’ve always wanted a 3D printer, here’s your chance to win one. Makerbot Industries wants the Internets to design a new mascot for them. The contest winner will receive a Makerbot Thing-o-matic.

Don’t worry about a chicken or egg situation with this contest. You don’t actually need to print your design (although printability is a quality considered when judging). All you need to do to enter is upload your design files before the deadline on September 28th. Designs must be robot themed, and anything uploaded as Private will be made Public after contest results are announce. It should be fun looking through all of the submissions. There’s several other design restrictions so make sure to read carefully before you get to work.

Those that would rather work with a soldering iron than design plastic robot parts need not despair. You haven’t missed the deadline for the 7400 Logic contest, which is accepting entries through October 21st.

[Will] from Revolt Lab needed a project to get the summer campers he supervises interested in electronics, but when your audience is 5 years old, your subject matter had better be simple, yet interesting enough to hold their attention at length. He settled on using a Lego NXT robot to keep their little minds engaged, because who doesn’t like robots?

He picked up a basic Lego NXT kit and paged through the manual. The first “example” robot looked pretty cool so he decided to give it a shot, though he still hadn’t figured out exactly what he would have the robot do. Inspiration struck, and he decided that he could take advantage of the NXT’s color sensor as well as its proximity sensor to construct a balloon hunting robot.

He constructed a “balloon corral” to keep the balloons in place and the kids out of his thumbtack-wielding robot’s reach. He let his creation loose, and as you can see in the video below, the robot hunts down the blue balloon and pops it, much to the children’s delight.

If you’re in the position to introduce a group of young kids to electronics, this balloon popping robot paired with some conductive Play Dough would make for a fun and educational afternoon workshop.

[shadeydave] wanted to build his own Lawnbot, but he had no idea where to start. He purchased some DIY plans online which looked like they would get the job done, but then he strayed from the path in a big way and spent gobs of money in the process.

In his Instructable writeup, he details each misstep he made, explaining why his choices were bad as well as how much each mistake cost him. It sounds like pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong, from spending money on unnecessary microcontrollers to choosing the wrong wheels. Our favorite part is where he mentions that he couldn’t figure out how to create a “kill switch” for the Lawnbot in the event that his transmitter loses contact with the speedy whirling death machine.

[shadeydave] is well aware of how poorly his build went, and primarily wrote it up as a cautionary tale to others out there who might decide to take on a similar project. He says that the Lawnbot works for the most part, but with his newfound wisdom he will be revising the bot, having learned from his mistakes.

We actually like to see this kind of writeup as they can be quite beneficial to someone trying to put together a similar project. So if you have some major flubs under your belt, don’t be shy about digging them out and letting us know. As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Continue reading to see a quick video tour of [shadeydave's] mostly working Lawnbot.

To test his new skills with his Arduino, [Ben] decided that he would build a robot. With no particular need to fill other than the need to build something cool he chose to build himself a tree climbing robot. He designed the body of the robot in Google Sketchup before beginning the build. The body is made mainly from aluminium, with four motors for the gripping legs and one for the spine. [Ben] controlled the motors with the familiar L298 motor driver chip and measured their position and speed using some cleverly mounted potentiometers.  The robot can climb trees of varying diameter by using the speed of the motors driving the legs to determine when the tree has been gripped.

[Ben] was then kind enough to write up a full instructable describing the build, this project includes a bit of everything, from motor control and liner drives to tips on creating a robot frame; a good read for someone wanting to get into robotics. Also check out the video after the break to see the robot in action.