DARPA Goes Underground For Next Challenge

August 16, 2018 by Roger Cheng 16 Comments

We all love reading about creative problem-solving work done by competitors in past DARPA robotic challenges. Some of us even have ambition to join the fray and compete first-hand instead of just reading about them after the fact. If this describes you, step on up to the DARPA Subterranean Challenge.

Following up on past challenges to build autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots, DARPA now wants to focus collective brainpower solving problems encountered by robots working underground. There will be two competition tracks: the Systems Track is what we’ve come to expect, where teams build both the hardware and software of robots tackling the competition course. But there will also be a Virtual Track, opening up the challenge to those without resources to build big expensive physical robots. Competitors on the virtual track will run their competition course in the Gazebo robot simulation environment. This is similar to the NASA Space Robotics Challenge, where algorithms competed to run a virtual robot through tasks in a simulated Mars base. The virtual environment makes the competition accessible for people without machine shops or big budgets. The winner of NASA SRC was, in fact, a one-person team.

Back on the topic of the upcoming DARPA challenge: each track will involve three sub-domains. Each of these have civilian applications in exploration, infrastructure maintenance, and disaster relief as well as the obvious military applications.

Man-made tunnel systems
Urban underground
Natural cave networks

There will be a preliminary circuit competition for each, spaced roughly six months apart, to help teams get warmed up one environment at a time. But for the final event in Fall of 2021, the challenge course will integrate all three types.

More details will be released on Competitor’s Day, taking place September 27th 2018. Registration for the event just opened on August 15th. Best of luck to all the teams! And just like we did for past challenges, we will excitedly follow progress. (And have a good-natured laugh at fails.)

Theo Jansen Invents A Faster, Simpler, Wind-Powered Strandbeest

August 16, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 25 Comments

[Theo Jansen] has come up with a n intriguing wind-powered strandbeest which races along the beach with surprising speed and grace. According to [Jansen], it “doesn’t have hinging joints like the classical strandbeests, so they don’t get sand in their joints and you don’t have to lubricate them.” It’s called UMINAMI, which appropriately means “ocean wave” in Japanese.

There are only videos of it in action to go on so far, but a lot can be gleaned from them. To make it easier to keep track of just a single leg, we’ve slowed things down and reddened one of them in the banner animation. Those legs seem to be providing a push but the forward motion is more likely supplied by the sails. The second video below shows it being pulled along by the type of strandbeest we’re all more used to seeing.

What follows is an analysis and best guess about how it works. Or you can just enjoy its graceful undulations in the videos below.

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Thomas The Terrifying Karaoke Robot

August 13, 2018 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

The junk bin can be a great source of inspiration, unless you’re too familiar with the contents to be imaginative with them. But thrift stores are another matter, like giant junk bins that are constantly replenished by underappreciated elves. You never know what kinds of goodies they will pile on the shelves, so it’s easy to become a fixture and visit them once or thrice a week.

[Hunter Irving] haunts a few choice thrift stores in his neighborhood, and a few months ago he found a knockoff Thomas the Tank Engine with an articulated face. It uses a simple mechanism to produce an impressive amount of movement, especially for a cheap knockoff toy. Both of its eyes slide sideways and its mouth opens, resulting in a very animated (and terrifying) range of expressions. Sensing an opportunity to turn his animatronic robot dreams into karaoke-singing nightmare fuel for the rest of us, he forked over a few bucks and took it home.

As luck would have it, a 9g micro servo fit perfectly in the back of the frightening little face. [Hunter] designed an axle to transfer motion to the face mechanism, but it broke almost immediately. We applaud his Plan B, though, which consists of a mounting block for the servo, and a cable tie armature connected with screws. Once that was sorted, [Hunter] designed a bulbous body for it in Blender.

This terrifying train-faced toy uses an Arduino Leonardo to read MIDI note-on and -off messages, and opens his mouth when appropriate to sing hit favorites in a smooth, speech-synthesized contralto. Pour yourself a strong beverage and enjoy the build/demo video after the break.

Interested in making your own? [Hunter] has all the files up on his Patreon page. For just $1, you can access the code, synth files, and STL files. While you’re there, you can also get the scoop on his Nintendo LABO waveform cards.

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Line Following Robot Without The Lines

August 10, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 19 Comments

Line-following robots are a great intro to robotics in general, since the materials and skills needed to build a good one aren’t too advanced. It turns out that line-following robots are more than just a learning tool, too. They’re pretty useful in industry, but most of them don’t follow visible marked lines. Some, like this inductive guided robot from [Randall] make use of wires to determine their paths.

Some of the benefits of inductive guidance over physical lines are that the wires can be hidden in floors, so if something like an automated forklift is using them at a warehouse there will be less trip hazard and less maintenance of the guides. They also support multiple paths, so no complicated track switching has to take place. [Randall]’s robot is a small demonstration of a larger system he built as a technician for an autonomous guided vehicle system. His video goes into the details of how they work, more of their advantages and disadvantages, and a few other things.

While inductive guided robots have been used for decades now, they’re starting to be replaced by robots with local positioning systems and computer vision. We’ve recently seen robots that are built to utilize these forms of navigation as well.

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Ease Rover Development With These Self-Contained Track Units

August 10, 2018 by Donald Papp 2 Comments

Tracked drive systems are great, but implementation isn’t always easy. That’s what [nahueltaibo] found every time he tried to use open sourced track designs for his own rovers. The problem is that a tracked drive system is normally closely integrated with a vehicle’s chassis, mixing and matching between designs is impractical because the tracks and treads aren’t easily separated from the rest of the vehicle.

To solve this, [nahueltaibo] designed a modular, 3D printable rover track system. It contains both a motor driver and a common DC gearmotor in order to make a standalone unit that can be more easily integrated into other designs. These self-contained rover tracks don’t even have a particular “inside” or “outside”; they can be mounted on a vehicle’s left or right without any need to mirror the design. The original CAD design is shared from Fusion 360, but can also be downloaded from Thingiverse. A bit more detail is available from [nahueltaibo]’s blog, where he urges anyone who tries the design or finds it useful to share a photo or two.

3D printed tank tracks — including this one — often use a piece of filament as a hinge between track segments and sometimes slightly melted on the ends to act as a kind of rivet, which is itself a pretty good hack.

Twitch Plays Battling Robots?

August 8, 2018 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

Audience interaction reached an all-time high in 2014 with Twitch Plays Pokemon, an online gaming stream where viewers were able to collaboratively command an emulated Game Boy playing Pokemon Red. Since then, the concept has taken off. Today, we see this extended to robots in the real world, with [theotherlonestar]’s Twitch Chat Controlled Robots.

The build is one that takes advantage of modern off-the-shelf components – an ESP8266 provides the brains, while a Pololu Zumo provides a ready to go robot chassis to save time on the mechanical aspects of the build. An L298N dual motor controller then handles motive power.

The real ingenuity though, is teaching the robots to respond to commands from Twitch chat. The chat is available in a readily parsable IRC format, which makes programming around it easy. [theotherlonestar] created a command set that enables the robots to be driven remotely by stream viewers, and then outfitted the ‘bots with hammers with which to fight, as well as a fedora to tip, if one is so inclined.

It’s a cool build, and one which shows further promise as Twitch continues to reduce stream & chat latency. We look forward to seeing future battles, but the first one already excites.

Interested in where it all began? Check out our Twitch Plays Pokemon coverage from way back when. Video after the break.

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Feast Your Eyeballs On This Mechanical Eyeball

August 4, 2018 by Jenny List 1 Comment

Most of us, if we have bought a single board computer with the capability to support a camera, will have succumbed to temptation and shelled out for that peripheral in the hope that we can coax our new toy into having sight. We’ll have played with the command line tool and taken a few random images of our bench, but then what? There is so much possibility in a camera that our colleague [Steven Dufresne] wanted to explore with his Raspberry Pi, so he built a motorised eyeball mount with which to do so.

Pan & tilt mounts using RC servos are nothing especially new, but in this one he’s put some design effort that maybe some of the others lack. A lot of effort has gone in to ensuring no interference between the two axes, and in a slightly macabre twist until you remember it’s a model he’s talking about, the unit has been designed to fit inside a human head.

The servos are driven from the Pi using a servo driver board he’s discussed in another video, so once he’s described the assembly with a few design tweaks thrown in he has a quick look at the software demo he’s written emulating neurons for eye tracking. He promises that will be put up somewhere for download in due course.

If you’re in the market for a pan & tilt mount for your Pi, this one could make a lot of sense to throw at your 3D printer. It’s certainly more accomplished than this previous one we’ve shown you.

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