Lego Robot Plays Games For You As You Sleep

April 17, 2014 by 19 Comments

robot

[Uli Kilian] — best known for solving 100 Rubik’s cubes during the 2011 London Marathon — got addicted to a free iPad game called Jurassic Park builder. Being the efficient man he is, he soon realized the game could be automated — after all, you just have to tap on dinosaurs every few minutes to earn in-game currency…

He’s using a Lego Technic set with an old iPad, and an Arduino connected to a Windows laptop. Wheels roll the iPad back and forth as the robot plays the game. The “finger” of the robot is wrapped in tin-foil and connected to a ground pin to simulate a human finger for the iPad. The article doesn’t explain how it works, but by looking at the robot it appears to just randomly tap away back and forth across the screen — which we guess works for this game?

He hasn’t played with Lego since he was 8, and only just learned about the Arduino a few weeks prior to building this. As a 3D artist he was intrigued to do something in the real-world — nice!

[Thanks Aurelio and William!]

LEGO Robot Lays Dominoes Not Eggs

January 11, 2010 by 17 Comments

[Mattias] brings the awesome once more with his LEGO robot that sets up dominoes. You’ll remember his work from the wooden keyboard case and the mechanical binary adder. This time around he’s still exercising those woodworking skills by making his own domino tiles, but it’s the robot that makes this interesting. In the must-see video after the break the device lays perfectly straight, perfectly spaced dominoes just begging to be upset by a spoiled toddler. The robot is nothing more than handful of LEGO parts powered by a tape deck motor. The parts may be meager, but there’s an abundance of ingenuity tied up in the design.

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Lego Ziplining Robot Climbs For Claps

September 28, 2020 by 10 Comments

The internet has given us plenty of cool robotics projects, but we don’t think we’ve seen one zipline before. At least not until now.

This cool little ziplining robot is courtesy of the folks over at [Tart Robotics]. As they described it, the robot moves using a 4-bar linkage mechanism with the motor’s torque “transferred to the arm mechanisms through a pair of bevel gears and a worm drive.” Even cooler, the robot is activated by clapping. The faster you clap, the faster the robot moves. That’s sure to wow your friends at your next virtual hacker meetup.

They had to do a bit of custom 3D printing work to get a few of the Lego components to connect with their non-Lego off-the-shelf bits, so that took a bit of time. Specifically, they had some cheap, non-branded DC motors that they used that did not naturally mate with the Lego Technic components used to create the rest of the robot’s body. Nothing a few custom 3D printing jobs couldn’t solve.

It always amazes us what cool contraptions you can put together with a few Lego blocks. What’s your favorite Lego project?

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LEGO-Based Robot Arm With Motion Planning

July 14, 2019 by 1 Comment

Robotic arms have found all manner of applications in industry. Whether its welding cars, painting cars, or installing dashboards in cars, robotic arms can definitely do the job. However, you don’t need to be a major automaker to experiment with the technology. You can build your own, complete with proper motion planning, thanks to Arduino and ROS.

Motion planning is important, as it makes working with the robotic arm much easier. Rather than having to manually specify the rotation of each and every joint for every desired movement, instead mathematics is used to figure everything out. End effectors can be moved, and software will figure out the necessary motions required to achieve the end results. This functionality is baked into Robot Operating System (ROS) and proves useful to this project.

The construction of this particular arm is impressive in its simplicity, too. It has 7 degrees of freedom, which is plenty to play with. The arm is built out of LEGO Technic components, which are attached to the servos with the addition of some 3D printed components. It’s a smart and simple way to integrate the servos into the LEGO world, and we’re surprised we don’t see this more often.

Robotic arms remain an area of active research; there are even efforts to allow them to self-correct in the event of damage. Video after the break.

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Converting A Robotic Motor For Lego Blocks

June 22, 2017 by 7 Comments

The Internet has brought a lot of advantage to life, not the least of which is access to really cheap electronic parts. [KarelK166] was buying cheap geared motors for projects, but they didn’t easily work with Lego blocks. He found an easy way to adapt them and–lucky for us–decided to share.

The process is pretty simple. The gearbox has two screws and an elastic band holding it together. Once the gears are exposed, you can drill a hole in two of them with a 4.8mm drill bit. This might take a little practice since the gear needs to hold still, but you also don’t want to crush the plastic teeth. You also need to enlarge a hole in the casing, but that’s easier to clamp down in a vise.

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Universal Robots Vision-Based LEGO Stacker

June 11, 2017 by 2 Comments

[Thomas Kølbæk Jespersen] and his classmates at Aalborg University’s Robot Vision course used MATLAB code and URscript to program a Universal Robots UR5 to stack up Duplo bricks. The Duplo bricks are stacked into low-fi Simpsons characters — yellow for Homer’s head, white for his shirt, and blue for his pants, for example.

The bricks are scattered randomly on a nearby table, while a camera mounted above the table scans the bricks and assists in determining the location, color, and orientation of the elements. This involves blob analysis which helps the computer decide what pixel is part of a brick and what isn’t. After running a recursive grassfire algorithm with 4-connectivity, the computer gives each pixel a number and assigns it to a blob.

To determine the orientation (the bricks are all assumed to be stud-side up and not overlapping) the blob is divided into quadrants and within each quadrant, the distance between the center of the blob and its farthest pixel is measured. This technique is not likely to work as well with a brick that isn’t square. Each brick’s location in pixels is translated into Cartesian coordinates, making it a cinch for the robot to pick it up. See [Thomas]’s GitHub for MATLAB and URscript code.

Looking for more UR5 projects? Check out the Sewbo garment-making robot we published last year.

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Lego Boosts Their Robotic Offering

January 21, 2017 by 22 Comments

Kids often have their first exposure to robots in school using Lego Mindstorm kits. Now Lego is rolling out Boost — a robotic kit targeting all Lego builders from 7 years old and up. The kit is scheduled to be on the market later this year (it appeared at the recent CES) and will sell for about $160.

[The Brothers Brick] had a chance to try the kit out at CES (see the video below) and you might find their review interesting. The kit provides parts and instructions to build five different models: a cat, a robot, a guitar, a 3D printer, and a tracked vehicle. You can check out the official page, too.

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