Robotic Rose Of Enchantment Drops Petals On Command

December 19, 2023 by 2 Comments

In Disney’s 1991 film Beauty and the Beast, an enchantress curses the young (10 or 11-year-old) prince to beast-hood for spurning her based solely on her appearance. She gives him a special rose that she says will bloom until his 21st birthday, at which time he’ll be turned back into a prince, provided that he learned to love by then. If not, he’ll be a beast for eternity. As the years go by, the rose drops the occasional petal and begins to wilt under the bell jar where he keeps it.

[Gord Payne] was tasked with building such a rose of enchantment for a high school production and knocked it out of the park. With no budget provided, [Gord] used what he had lying about the house, like nylon trimmer line. In fact, that’s probably the most important part of this build. A piece of trimmer line runs up through the stem made of tubing and out the silk rose head, which connects with a custom 3-D printed part.

Each loose petal hangs from the tubing using a short length of wire. Down at the base, the trimmer line is attached to a servo horn, which is connected to an Adafruit Circuit Playground. When the button is pressed on the remote, the servo retracts the trimmer line a little bit, dropping a petal. Be sure to check out the demo after the break.

Dropping petals is an interesting problem to solve. Most of the flower hacks we see around here involve blooming, which presents its own set of troubles.

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The Logg Dogg: How A Mysterious Logging Robot Leads Down Twisting Forestry Paths

December 16, 2023 by 31 Comments

There are many places where you’d want to use remotely controlled robots, but perhaps forestry isn’t the first application to come to mind. Yet there are arguments to be made for replacing something like a big logging machine with grapple for a much smaller robot. The reduced ground pressure can be beneficial in fragile ecosystems, and removing the operator is much safer if felling a tree goes wrong.

This is where a US company called Forest Robots tried to come in, with their Logg Dogg, of which [Wes] over at Watch Wes Work found a very unique prototype abandoned in a barn, courtesy of Zuckerberg’s marketplace of wonders.

One of the two receivers on the Forest Robots' Logg Dogg logging robot prototype. (Credit: Watch Wes Work)
One of the two receivers on the Forest Robots’ Logg Dogg logging robot prototype. (Credit: Watch Wes Work)

After lugging the poor abandoned robot back into a warm repair shop, he set to work on figuring out what it was that he had bought. At the time he knew only that it was some kind of logging robot, but with no model number or name on the robot, it was tough to find information. Eventually he got tipped off about it being the Logg Dogg, with even a video of the robot in action, helpfully uploaded to YouTube by [Hankey Mountain Garage] and embedded below for your viewing pleasure.

As [Wes] noticed during teardown and inspection was that it has that distinct mix-and-match feel to it of a prototype, ranging from metric and US customary bolts to both European and US/Canadian supplied components. Although it has two RF receivers on the device, no remote(s) came with the device, and the seller only knew that it was already in the barn when they purchased the place. After getting the engine working again on the robot, [Wes] contacted one of the people behind the robot: [Dean Edwards], a professor at the University of Idaho, hoping to learn more about this robot and how it ended up abandoned in a barn.

Hopefully we’ll find out in a Part 2 whether [Wes] got a response, and whether this robot will get a second chance at life. Meanwhile, in countries such as Portugal such robots are already finding significant use, including for fire protection in its forests, tackling difficult terrain more easily than humans. With forest fires an increasing risk, perhaps the Logg Dogg and kin could find a use there.

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Anthrobots can promote gap closures on scratched live neuronal monolayers. (Credit: Gumuskaya et al., 2023)

Anthrobots: Tiny Robots From Tracheal Epithelium Cells That Can Fix Neural Damage

December 6, 2023 by 10 Comments

Although we often regard our own bodies and those of the other multicellular organisms around us as a singular entity, each cell that makes up our body is its own, nano-robot. One long-existing question was whether these cells can be used for other tasks — like biological robots — after they have specialized into a specific tissue type, with a recent study by [Gizem Gumuskaya] and colleagues in Advanced Science (with Nature news coverage) indicating a potential intriguing use of adult human epithelial cells recovered from the trachea.

Human bronchial epithelial cells self-construct into multicellular motile living architectures. (Credit: Gumuskaya et al., 2023)
Human bronchial epithelial cells self-construct into multicellular motile living architectures. (Credit: Gumuskaya et al., 2023)

After extraction, these adult cells were kept in an extracellular matrix (ECM, Matrigel) in conditions promoting cell division, followed by ECM dissolution after 14 days and subsequent culturing of the spherical clumps of cells that had thus formed in a water-based, low-viscosity environment. This environment, along with the addition of retinoic acid promoted the development of outward-facing cilia, rather than the typical inward type with a gel-based ECM.

These spheroids (anthrobots, referencing their human origin) generally showed the ability to move using these cilia, with the direction largely determined by the symmetry of the sphere. Multiple of these motile spheroids were then placed on a layer of human neural tissue, in which a scratch had damaged a number of the neurons to form a gap. The anthrobots grouped together over the course of days to form a bridge across the gap, with the neural tissue observed to regrow underneath this bridge, a behavior that could not be repeated by using a dummy support consisting out of agarose on another neural sample, indicating that it is this living bridge that enabled neural regeneration.

Although the researchers rightfully indicate that they are uncertain which factors actually induce this restorative effect in the neurons, it offers exciting glimpses into a potential feature where neural damage is easily repaired, and biological robots made from our own cells can be assembled to perform a variety of tasks.

Single-piece Tank Chassis Goes Robotic

November 27, 2023 by 8 Comments

[EXTREME3DPRINT] has a new version of their print-in-place tank chassis: the PiPBOT now accepts drop-in motors (in the form of 360° rotation servos), RC receiver, and battery pack to make a functional RC tank platform in no time flat. The design is entirely 3D printed with no supports needed.

This new version is a paid 3D model (and it includes STEP files, thankfully) but the original proof-of-concept print-in-place tank chassis is free and remains a highly clever piece of design that really shows off what is possible when one plays to a 3D printer’s strengths.

A better look at the design’s details can be found on the designer’s website, and a short video demonstrating assembly and operation is embedded below. We particularly like the attachment points on the top of the PiPBOT, which allows for securely mounting all kinds of customized payloads.

Interested in this style of printable RC platform, but want something a little more accessible? If race cars are more your thing, we’d like to also mention the Gamma 2.0 by [Under Engineered]. It’s a print-in-place RC car that needs minimal parts to get rolling and would make an excellent afternoon project.

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Robot Goes To Summer Camp

November 26, 2023 by 3 Comments

There are a lot of hobby and educational robots that have a similar form factor: a low, wide body with either wheels or tracks for locomotion. When [Alexander Kirilov] wanted to teach a summer robot camp, he looked at several different commercial offerings and found all of them somewhat lacking. His wish list was a neat-looking compact robot that was easy to extend, had various sensors, and would work with Python. Finding nothing to his liking, he set out to make his own, and Yozh robot was born.

The robot certainly looks neat. There is a color TFT display, seven reflective sensors pointing down, two laser time-of-flight sensors facing forward, an IMU, and some LEDs. There are plenty of expansion ports, too. You can check out the code that runs it, too.

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Robot Hand Has Good Bones

November 16, 2023 by 8 Comments

What do you get when you mix rigid and elastic polymers with a laser-scanning 3D printing technique? If you are researchers at ETH Zurich, you get robot hands with bones, ligaments, and tendons. In conjunction with a startup company, the process uses both fast-curing and slow-curing plastics, allowing parts with different structural properties to print. Of course, you could always assemble things from multiple kinds of plastics, but this new technique — vision-controlled jetting — allows the hands to print as one part. You can read the full paper from Nature or see the video below.

Wax with a low melting point encases the entire structure, acting as a support. The researchers remove the wax after the plastics cure.

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Robots: How The Pros Keep Them Safe

November 15, 2023 by 4 Comments

Robotic safety standards are designed for commercial bots, but amateur robot builders should also consider ideas like the keepout zone where a mobile robot isn’t permitted to go or how to draw out the safety perimeter space for your experimental robot arm. After all, that robot arm won’t stop crushing your fingers because you built it yourself. So, it is worth looking at the standards for industrial robots, even if your aim is fun rather than profit.

The basics of this for fixed robots like robot arms are defined in the standard R15-06. You don’t need to read the full text (because it costs $325 and is *incredibly* tedious to read), but the Association for Advancing Automation has a good background on the details. The bottom line is to ensure that a user can’t reach into an area that the robot arm might move to and provide a quick and easy way to disable the motors if someone does reach in.

Robots that move, called Industrial Mobile Robots (IMRs) or Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) bring in a whole new set of problems, though, because they are designed to move around under their own control and often share space with humans. For them, the standard is called R15.08. The AGV network has a good guide to the details, but again, it boils down to two things: make sure the robot is keeping an eye on its surroundings and that it can stop quickly enough to avoid injury.