Civilian RC Car Uses Lego NXT And Ada

March 14, 2020 by Al Williams 4 Comments

Back in the last century, the US Department of Defense declared that Ada was going to be used everywhere and for everything. Books were published, schools build curriculum. Working programmers, however, filled out waivers to continue working in their languages of choice. As a result, only a little bit of safety-critical software really used Ada. However, we’ve noticed a bit of a resurgence lately. Case in point: an RC car using Ada for the brains. You can watch it tool around in the video below.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Ada in the past few months. Partially, this could be because of the availability of the GNU compiler, although that’s been around since 1995, so maybe there’s another explanation. Ada’s strong typing does tend to plug holes that hackers exploit, so while we would hate to say it is hack proof, it certainly is hack resistant compared to many popular languages.

Continue reading “Civilian RC Car Uses Lego NXT And Ada” →

Dexter Robot Arm Embraces New Manufacturing With First Micro-Factory

March 9, 2020 by Mike Szczys 32 Comments

Haddington Dynamics, the company behind the Dexter robot arm that won the 2018 Hackaday Prize, has opened its first microfactory to build robot arms for Australia and Southeast Asia.

You may remember that the combination of Dexter’s makeup and capabilities are what let it stand out among robotics projects. The fully-articulated robot arm can be motion trained; it records how you move the arm and can play back with high precision rather than needing to be taught with code. The high-precision is thanks to a clever encoder makeup that leverages the power of FPGAs to amplify the granularity of its optical encodes. And it embraces advanced manufacturing to combine 3D printed and glue-up parts with mass produced gears, belts, bearings, and motors.

It’s a versatile robot arm, for a fraction of the cost of what came before it, with immense potential for customization. And did I mention that it’s open source? Continue reading “Dexter Robot Arm Embraces New Manufacturing With First Micro-Factory” →

See The Damage 250-Pound Combat Robots Get

March 9, 2020 by Donald Papp 14 Comments

Combat robots have been a thing for a while, but we don’t normally get a close look at the end results of the sort of damage they can both take and deal out. [Raymond Ma] spent time helping out with season four of BattleBots and wrote about the experience, as well as showed several pictures of the kind of damage 250-pound robots can inflict upon each other. We’ve embedded a few of them here, but we encourage you to read [Raymond]’s writeup and see the rest for yourself.

The filming for a season of BattleBots is done in a relatively short amount of time, which means the pacing and repair work tends to be more fast and furious than slow and thoughtful. [Raymond] says that it isn’t uncommon for bots, near the end of filming, to be held together with last-minute welds, wrong-sized parts, and sets of firmly-crossed fingers. This isn’t because the bots themselves are poorly designed or made; it’s because they can get absolutely wrecked by the forces at play.

Continue reading “See The Damage 250-Pound Combat Robots Get” →

Robot Fights Fire With IR

March 8, 2020 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

Fighting fire with robots may take jobs away from humans, but it can also save lives. [Mell Bell Electronics] has built a (supervised) kid-friendly version of a firefighting robot that extinguishes flames by chasing them down and blowing them out.

This hyper-vigilant robot is always on the lookout for fire, and doesn’t waste movement on anything else. As soon as it detects the presence of a flame, it centers itself on the source and speeds over to snuff it out with a fan made from a propeller and a DC motor.

Here comes the science: fire emits infrared light, and hobbyist flame sensors use IR to, well, detect fire. This fire bot has three of these flame sensors across the front that output digital data to what has got to be the world’s smallest Arduino – the ATmega32U4-based PICO board that [Mell Bell] just so happens to sell. Cover your mouth and nose and crawl along the floor toward the break to see how responsive this thing is.

Firefighters aren’t the only brave humans involved in the process of keeping the forests standing, or who feel the rising pressure of automation. Hackaday’s own [Tom Nardi] wrote a piece on a dying breed called fire lookouts that will no doubt ignite your interest.

Continue reading “Robot Fights Fire With IR” →

DARPA Challenge Autonomous Robot Teams To Navigate Unfinished Nuclear Power Plant

March 6, 2020 by Roger Cheng 4 Comments

Robots might be finding their footing above ground, but today’s autonomous robots have a difficult time operating underground. DARPA wanted to give the state of the art a push forward, so they are running a Subterranean (SubT) Challenge which just wrapped up its latest round. A great review of this Urban Circuit competition (and some of the teams participating in it) has been published by IEEE Spectrum. This is the second of three underground problem subdomains presented to the participants, six months apart, preparing them for the final event which will combine all three types.

If you missed the livestream or prefer edited highlight videos, they’re all part of DARPAtv’s Subterranean Challenge playlist. Today it starts with a compilation of Urban Circuit highlights and continues to other videos. Including team profiles, video walkthrough of competition courses, actual competition footage, edited recap videos, and the awards ceremony. Half of the playlist are video from the Tunnels Circuit six months ago, so we can compare to see how teams performed and what they’ve learned along the way. Many more lessons were learned in the just-completed Urban Circuit and teams will spend the next six months improving their robots. By then we’ll have the Caves Circuit competition with teams ready to learn new lessons about operating robots underground.

Continue reading “DARPA Challenge Autonomous Robot Teams To Navigate Unfinished Nuclear Power Plant” →

A Honeycomb Patching Robot Powered By Arduino

March 3, 2020 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

No, it’s not the kind of honeycomb you’re probably thinking of. We’re talking about the lightweight panels commonly used in aerospace applications. Apparently they’re rather prone to dents and other damage during handling, so Boeing teamed up with students from the California State University to come up with a way to automate the time-consuming repair process.

The resulting machine, which you can see in action after the break, is a phenomenal piece of engineering. But more than that, it’s an impressive use of off-the-shelf components. The only thing more fascinating than seeing this robotic machine perform its artful repairs is counting how many of its core components you’ve got laying around the shop.

Built from aluminum extrusion, powered by an Arduino Due, and spinning a Dewalt cut-off tool that looks like it was just picked it up from Home Depot, you could easily source most of the hardware yourself. Assuming you needed to automatically repair aerospace-grade honeycomb panels, anyway.

At the heart of this project is a rotating “turret” that holds all the tools required for the repair. After the turret is homed and the condition of all the cutting tools is verified, a hole is drilled into the top of the damaged cell. A small tool is then carefully angled into the hole (a little trick that is mechanical poetry in motion) to deburr the hole, and a vacuum is used to suck out any of the filings created by the previous operations. Finally a nozzle is moved into position and the void is filled with expanding foam.

Boeing says it takes up to four hours for a human to perform this same repair. Frankly, that seems a little crazy to us. But then again if we were the ones tasked with repairing a structural panel for a communications satellite or aircraft worth hundreds of millions of dollars, we’d probably take our time too. The video is obviously sped up so it’s hard to say exactly how long this automated process takes, but it doesn’t seem like it could be much more than a few minutes from start to finish.

Continue reading “A Honeycomb Patching Robot Powered By Arduino” →

Hackaday Podcast 056: Cat Of 9 Heads, Robot Squats, PhD In ESP32, And Did You Hear About Sonos?

February 28, 2020 by Mike Szczys No comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys gab on great hacks of the past week. Did you hear that there’s a new rev of the Pi 4 out there? We just heard… but apparently it’s release into the wild was months ago. Fans of the ESP8266 are going to love this tool that flashes and configures the board, especially for Sonoff devices. Bitluni’s Supercon talk was published this week and it’s a great roadmap of all the things you should try to do with an ESP32. Plus we take on the Sonos IoT speaker debacle and the wacky suspension system James Bruton’s been building into his humanoid robot.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)