An Optical Mouse Sensor For Robotic Vision

July 6, 2018 by Jenny List 22 Comments

Readers with long memories will remember the days when mice and other similar pointing devices relied upon a hard rubber ball in contact with your desk or other surface, that transmitted any motion to a pair of toothed-wheel rotation sensors. Since the later half of the 1990s though, your rodent has been ever significantly more likely to rely upon an optical sensor taking the form of a small CCD camera connected to motion sensing electronics. These cameras are intriguing components with applications outside pointing devices, as is shown by [FoxIS] who has used one for robot vision.

The robot in question is a skid-steer 4-wheeled toy, to which he has added an ADNS3080 mouse sensor fitted with a lens, an H-bridge motor driver board, and a Wemos D1 Mini single board computer. The D1 serves a web page showing both the image from the ADNS3080 and an interface that allows the robot to be directed over a network connection. A pair of LiPo batteries complete the picture, with voltage monitoring via one of the Wemos analogue pins.

The ADNS3080 is an interesting component and we’d love see more of it. This laser distance sensor or perhaps this car movement tracker should give you some more info. We’ve heard rumors of them being useful for drones. Anyone?

Junk Bin Self Balancing Bot With ESP8266

July 5, 2018 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

As we all know, sometimes the projects we plan simply never materialize. You have an idea, maybe even buy some of the parts you need, and then…nothing. Maybe you changed your mind, or maybe the idea was never that good to begin with. In any event, time marches on, the parts pile up, and the ideas come and go. Such is the life of the hacker.

[Andrius Mikonis] writes in to tell us how his graveyard of abandoned projects ended up providing exactly what he needed to embark on a project he’s been fascinated with for years: the two-wheel self balancing robot. He started with a motor and wheel set that was originally intended to be part of a rover, added an accelerometer, and tied the whole thing together with an ESP-01 he had lying around. The final result certainly looks the part, and goes to show that projects don’t always need to be 1000 hour labors of love to accomplish their goals.

The construction of this little bot is simple in the extreme. A piece of plywood makes up the primary structure, with the wheels glued to the bottom and the electronics taking up residence in the top. It’s powered by two lithium battery cells that were salvaged out of an old laptop, with a DC-DC buck converter to provide a stable 3.3 VDC for the ESP-01 and MPU6050 accelerometer. To control the motors themselves, [Andrius] is using a cheap L293 controller that he found on eBay.

For interactive control, [Andrius] is making use of the ESP’s Wi-Fi to provide a web-based interface. This lets you control the bot from essentially any device that has a browser, rather than having to use a dedicated hardware transmitter.

Self-balancing robots of various levels of complexity are a relatively common project in the hacker world. There’s just something magical about the way they scoot around, seeming to defy gravity.

Wrangling RC Servos Becoming A Hassle? Try Serial Bus Servos!

July 5, 2018 by Roger Cheng 24 Comments

When we need actuators for a project, a servo from the remote-control hobby world is a popular solution. Though as the number of servos go up, keeping their wires neat and managing their control signals become a challenge. Once we start running more servos than we have fingers and toes, it’s worth considering the serial bus variety. Today we’ll go over what they are and examine three products on the market.

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Disney’s New Robot Limbs Trained Using Neural Networks

July 3, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 9 Comments

Disney is working on modular, intelligent robot limbs that snap into place with magnets. The intelligence comes from a reasonable sized neural network that also incorporates some modularity. The robot is their Snapbot whose base unit can fit up to eight of limbs, and so far they’ve trained with up to three together.

The modularity further extends to a choice of three types of limb. One with roll and pitch, another with yaw and pitch, and a third with roll, yaw, and pitch. Interestingly, of the three types, the yaw-pitch one seems most effective.

In this age of massive, deep neural networks requiring GPUs or even online services for training in a reasonable amount of time, it’s refreshing to see that this one’s only two layers deep and can be trained in three hours on a single-core, 3.4 GHz Intel i7 processor. Three hours may still seem long, but remember, this isn’t a simulation in a silicon virtual world. This is real-life where the servo motors have to actually move. Of course, they didn’t want to sit around and reset it after each attempt to move across the table so they built in an automatic mechanism to pull the robot back to the starting position before trying to cross the table again. To further speed training, they found that once they’d trained for one limb, they could then copy the last of the network’s layers to get a head starting on the training for two limbs.

Why do training? Afterall, we’ve seen pretty awesome multi-limbed robots working with manual coding, an example being this hexapod tank based on one from the movie Ghost in the Shell. They did that too and then compared the results of the manual approach with those of the trained one and the trained one moved further in the same amount of time. At a minimum, we can learn a trick or two from this modular crawler.

Check out their article for the details and watch it in action in its learning environment below.

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Drawing Lines In The Sand: Taking Beach Graffiti To The Next Level

July 3, 2018 by Ben James 39 Comments

When strolling down the beach, there’s always an urge to draw in the sand – it seems compulsory to make your mark by inscribing something. But there’s a dilemma: how do you go about physically drawing it? You could opt to remain standing and attempt to deploy a toe, but that requires a level of dexterity few possess. The only other option is to bend down and physically use your hands. Ultimately, there’s no way to draw anything in the sand without losing your dignity.

The solution? A robot, of course – the brainchild of [Ivan Miranda]. The idea is simple and elegantly executed: make a large linear actuator, place it on wheels, and attach a servo which can position an etching tool to be either in the sand or above it. The whole contraption moves forward one column at a time, making a vertical pass with the marker being engaged or disengaged as required. The columns are quite thin, giving relatively high-resolution text, though this does mean it take a while. Adding another servo and marking two adjacent columns at the same time would be an easy way to instantly double the speed.

The wheels are big and chunky, to ensure the horizontal distance travelled does not change between the top and the bottom. Of course, when making big parts like these it always helps if you’ve already built a giant custom 3D printer. If you want to read more of [Ivan]’s large scale 3D printing antics, checkout his tank with suspension, or plus-sized seven-segment clock.

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Video Quick-Bit: The Things That Move Robots

July 2, 2018 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

Magenta Strongheart returns for a look at some of the coolest robotic entries from this year’s Hackaday Prize. Each of these answered the challenge for modular designs that will help supercharge new robot projects.

We think that cheap and abundant motor designs are poised to revolutionize robotics and several of the entries thought along those same lines. [Masahiro Mizuno] came up with a great 3D printed servo design based around a 6mm DC motor. Also in this ballpark, a team of two — Giovanni Leal and Jonathan Diaz — used 3D printing to turn some tiny metallic servos into linear actuators.

Picking stuff up is a difficult thing for a machine to do. We’ve long enjoyed seeing jamming grippers which do it with an inflatable bladder around a granular material (watch the video… it’s amazing). Two of these were demonstrated as part of the challenge. The Universal Jamming Gripper focuses on the entire mechanism, while Programmable Air took aim at the pneumatic actuation system and can adapt to other soft-robotics uses.

Rounding out this update, make sure to take a peek at the PCB stepper motor [Bobricius] built after being inspired by [Carl Bugeja’s] PCB motor. You’ll also want to see the entry that is taking on industrial farming. Imaging slow-rolling behemoths that use computer vision and spinning tillers to take care of weeds, cutting down on herbicide use.

Right now we’re in the thick of the Power Harvesting Challenge. Show us how you’re getting power from an interesting source and you’ll be on the way to the finals. Twenty power harvesting entries will get that honor, along with a $1,000 cash prize. The five top entries of the 2018 Hackaday Prize will split $100,000!

Wave Goodbye To Honda Asimo, A Robot That Would Wave Back

July 1, 2018 by Roger Cheng 20 Comments

Fans of technology will recall a number of years when Honda’s humanoid robot Asimo seemed to be everywhere. In addition to its day job in a research lab, Asimo had a public relations side gig showing everyone that Honda is about more than cars and motorcycles. From trade shows to television programs, even amusement parks and concert halls, Asimo worked a busy publicity schedule. Now a retirement party may be in order, since the research project has reportedly been halted.

Asimo’s activity has tapered off in recent years so this is not a huge surprise. Honda’s official Asimo site itself hasn’t been updated in over a year. Recent humanoid robots in media are more likely to be in context of events like DARPA Robotics Challenge or from companies like Boston Dynamics. Plus the required technology has become accessible enough for us to build our own two-legged robots. So its torch has been passed on, but Asimo would be remembered as the robot who pioneered a lot of thinking into how humanoid robots would interact with flesh and blood humans. It was one of the first robots who could recognize human waving as a gesture, and wave back in return.

Many concepts developed from Asimo will live on as Honda’s research team shift focus to less humanoid form factors. We can see Honda’s new ambitions in their concept video released during CES 2018 (embedded below.) These robots are still designed to live and work alongside people, but now they are specialized to different domains and they travel on wheels. Which is actually a step closer to the Jetsons’ future, because Rosie rolls on wheels!

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