Floor Mopping Robot Takes Cleanliness To The Next Level

April 8, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

While it’s nice to have a robot vacuum your floors for you, a vacuum can only clean your house so much. For a really deep clean, you’ll also need to run a mop over the hard floor surfaces. [Josh] took this to its logical conclusion and built a robot that can really scour his floors for his entry into this year’s Hackaday Prize.

The robot has the ability to spray the floor with a cleaning solution, and then drive over it and scrub the floors with a squeegee. Its designed in a way that allows it to get into tight corners without needing a special brush, and of course it has all the bells and whistles that other robots have, such as ultrasonic sensors, collision detection, and a brain that allows it to navigate a course and get the entire area cleaned.

There are many videos of the robot in action on the project site, showing its operation and testing various features of the device. It’s a pretty interesting take on the home robot, and since its Open Hardware you can build your own if you’re often frustrated by having to mop your own floors, or you could modify it to do things other than squeegee the floors clean.

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These Gorgeous Robot Parts Are Hand-Made

April 7, 2018 by Donald Papp 12 Comments

[Dickel]’s robot MDi #4 has been in progress for several years, but what we wanted to draw your attention to is the way the parts have been fabricated and what kind of remarkable results are possible with careful design, measurement, cutting, and finishing. Much of MDi #4 was made by hand-cutting and drilling sheets of high impact polystyrene (HIPS) with a utility knife and layering them as needed. Epoxy and aluminum provide gap filling and reinforcement of key sections, and fiberglass took care of one of the larger sections.

The process [Dickel] follows is to prototype using cardboard first. Parts are then designed carefully in CAD, and printed out at a 1:1 scale and glued to sheets of polystyrene. Each sheet is cut and drilled by hand as necessary. Layers are stacked and epoxied, embedding any hardware needed in the process. Two examples of embedding hardware include sealing captive nuts into parts with epoxy, or using aluminum to add reinforcement. After some careful sanding, the pieces look amazing.

Scroll down a bit on that project page and you’ll see plenty of great photos of the process [Dickel] used. A video highlighting the head and a video showing the careful work that goes into making each part are embedded below.

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It’s A Spider! It’s A Droideka! It’s Both!

April 4, 2018 by James Hobson 8 Comments

Beware, arachnophobes, the robots are coming for you!

What else would you be expected to think if you watched a hexapod robot display its best Transformers impression by turning into a wheel and pushing itself in your direction? The BionicWheelBot — developed by [Festo] — should rightly remind you of the cartwheeling Flic-Flac spider, the main inspiration for the robot. Of course, Star Wars fans might justifiably see a Droideka.

The BionicWheelBot can — almost — seamlessly transition between crawling around on six legs, to literally rolling away. To do so, its three pairs of legs sequentially fold up into a shape befitting its namesake and then pauses for a moment — almost for dramatic effect — before the real fun begins.

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Laser-Cut Mecanum Wheel For The Budget Roboticist

April 4, 2018 by Sonya Vasquez 12 Comments

For the budding roboticist, omniwheels might be the next step in design patterns from your everyday “getting-started” robot kits. These wheels consist of tiny rollers that sit on the perimeter of the wheel and enable the wheel to freely slide laterally. With independent motor control of each wheel, a platform can freely locomote sideways by sliding on the rollers. You might think: “a wheel made of wheels? That sounds pricey…”–and you’d be right! Fear not, though; the folks at [Incubhacker] in Belgium have you covered with a laser-cut design that’s one-click away from landing on your workbench.

For anyone who’s tried to reliably mate flat laser-cut parts at an angle, we can tell you it’s no easy feat. The design here triumphs as both simple and reliable. Not only do they solve this problem elegantly, they also manage to create a design that will bear the load of a robot chassis that will travel with it. Laser-cut designs also usually suffer from a poor range of material options. Here the actual rollers need a bit more grip than what the plywood can provide. They also solve this problem effectively as well too, relying on heat-shrink tubing to provide the traction expected from a conventional wheel.

In the video below, [Incubhacker] takes you through the step-by process of making your own come to life. We’ve certainly seen some impressive laser-cut omniwheels in the past, but we like the simplicity of design combined with the composition of parts that probably already live on our workbenches.

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A Well-Chronicled Adventure In Tiny Robotics

April 2, 2018 by Roger Cheng 6 Comments

Some of us get into robotics dreaming of big heavy metal, some of us go in the opposite direction to build tiny robots scurrying around our tabletops. Our Hackaday.io community has no shortage of robots both big and small, each an expression of its maker’s ideals. For 2018 Hackaday Prize, [Bill Weiler] entered his vision in the form of Project Johnson Tiny Robot.

[Bill] is well aware of the challenges presented by working at a scale this small. (If he wasn’t before, he certainly is now…) Forging ahead with his ideas on how to build a tiny robot, and it’ll be interesting to see how they pan out. Though no matter the results, he has already earned our praise for setting aside the time to document his progress in detail and share his experience with the community. We can all follow along with his discoveries, disappointments, and triumphs. Learning about durometer scale in the context of rubber-band tires. Exploring features and limitations of Bluetooth hardware and writing code for said hardware. Debugging problems in the circuit board. And of course the best part – seeing prototypes assembled and running around!

As of this writing, [Bill] had just completed assembly of his V2 prototype which highlighted some issues for further development. Given his trend of documenting and sharing, soon we’ll be able to read about diagnosing the problems and how they’ll be addressed. It’s great to have a thoroughly documented project and we warmly welcome his robot to the ranks of cool tiny robots of Hackaday.io.

Zen And The Art Of Japanese Tea Robots

April 2, 2018 by Christopher Wang 10 Comments

In Japan, tea ceremony (cha-dou) is revered as a way to a gain deeper insights into life and philosophy. Traditional Japanese tea ceremony practitioners put in long hours to master the intricacies and details of pouring tea. The road to becoming a tea master is crucial as it develops the practitioner’s mental state as well as physical technique.

However if you don’t have time to master the “way of tea”, then you can build a bot and automate your zen experience. That’s exactly what the people at Ano Labs did when they built their Japanese Tea Ceremony Robot #151A.

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3D Printed Tank Tracks

March 31, 2018 by Al Williams 10 Comments

[Ivan] has been keeping his 3D printers busy with parts he’s experimenting with to build a tracked motion setup for a tank-like vehicle. His design uses several interlocking parts, so if you want to duplicate it, we hope your printer calibration is up to snuff. He’s still printing more parts and promises to release the files once the design proves out.

However, you can see he’s off to a good start. Small pieces fit together and accept a piece of filament as a sort of hinge. Some pins keep the filament from working out. Pads fit into the main parts and hold down with zip ties. The whole flexible tread locks into sprockets and a groove on a drive wheel.

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