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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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

Sonic The Self-Balancing Robot: Face-Plants And The Challenges Of Sensor Integration

February 26, 2020 by Danie Conradie 2 Comments

Watching a child learn to run is a joyous, but sometimes painful experience. It seems the same is true for [James Bruton]’s impressive Sonic the Self-Balancing robot, even with bendable knees and force sensitive legs.

We covered the mechanical side of the project recently, and now [James] has added the electronics to turn it into a truly impressive working robot (videos after the break). Getting it to this point was not without challenges, but fortunately he is sharing the experience with us, wipe-outs and all. The knees of this robot are actuated using a pair of motors with ball screws, which are not back drivable. This means that external sensors are needed to allow the motors to actively respond to inputs, which in this case are load cells in the legs and an MPU6050 IMU for balancing. The main control board is a Teensy 3.6, with an NRF24 module providing remote control.

[James] wanted the robot to be able to lean into turns and handle uneven surfaces (small ramps) without tipping or falling over. The leaning part was fairly simple (for him), but the sensor integration for uneven surfaces turned out to be a real challenge, and required multiple iterations to get working. The first approach was to move the robot in the direction of the tipping motion to absorb it, and then return to level. However, this could cause it to tip over slightly larger ramps. When trying to keep the robot level while going over a ramp with one leg, it would go into wild side-to-side oscillations as it drops back to level ground. This was corrected by using the load cells to dampen the motion.

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DARPA Subterranean Challenge Urban Circuit Now Livestreaming

February 20, 2020 by Roger Cheng 1 Comment

Currently underway is the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (SubT) systems competition for urban circuits streamed live on YouTube now through Wednesday, February 26th.

The DARPA Grand Challenge of 2004 kicked research and development of autonomous vehicles into high gear. Many components on today’s self-driving vehicles can be traced back to systems developed for that competition. Hoping to spur further development, DARPA has since held several more challenges focused moving the state of the art in autonomous robotics ahead.

To succeed in this challenge, robots must handle terrain that would confuse today’s self-driving cars. Cluttered environments, uneven surfaces of different materials, even the occasional flooded section are fair game. These robots also lose access to some of the tools previously available, such as GPS. The “systems track” denotes teams building physical robot systems versus a separate “virtual track” for simulation robots. “Urban circuit” is the second of four phases in this competition, environments of this phase are focused on man-made underground structures. (Think subway station.) For more details on this competition as well as description of various phases, see our introductory post or the competition site.

Those who rather not watch robots tentatively exploring unknown territory (and occasionally failing) may choose to wait for summaries published after competition rounds are complete. The first phase (tunnel circuit) from August-October 2019 was summarized by IEEE Spectrum here. Or you can go straight to DARPA for details on the systems track and virtual track with overall results posted on the competition site.

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Hackaday Podcast 054: Xenomorph Cookies, 101 Uses For Hot Glue, Rolling Robots, And A Clippy Computer

February 14, 2020 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys reflect on great hacks of the past few days. Strain relief is something every electronics geek encounters and there’s a spiffy way to make your hot-glue look like a factory connector. There’s something in the air and it seems to be recreating early computers. Did you know astronauts are baking cookies they’re forbidden to eat? And did you hear about the 3D printer that’s being fed oil from the deep fryer?

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.)