Robot Goes To Summer Camp

There are a lot of hobby and educational robots that have a similar form factor: a low, wide body with either wheels or tracks for locomotion. When [Alexander Kirilov] wanted to teach a summer robot camp, he looked at several different commercial offerings and found all of them somewhat lacking. His wish list was a neat-looking compact robot that was easy to extend, had various sensors, and would work with Python. Finding nothing to his liking, he set out to make his own, and Yozh robot was born.

The robot certainly looks neat. There is a color TFT display, seven reflective sensors pointing down, two laser time-of-flight sensors facing forward, an IMU, and some LEDs. There are plenty of expansion ports, too. You can check out the code that runs it, too.

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A long, skeletal neck of a swan automaton sits on a table. Two men are on either side of it, lowering the swan's body back on.

Restoring The Silver Swan Automaton

It’s easier than ever to build your own robot, but humans have been building automatons since before anyone had even thought of electronics. One beautiful example is the Silver Swan, built in the 18th century.

The brainchild of [John Joseph Merlin] and silversmith [James Cox], the swan features three separate clockwork drives, appearing to swim in a moving river where it snatches fish in its motorized beak. Mark Twain said the swan had “a living grace about his movements and living intelligence in his eyes” when he saw it at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1867.

The swan has been delighting people for 250 years, and recently received some much-deserved maintenance. In the video below, you can see museum staff disassembling the swan including its 113 neck rings which protect the three different chain drives controlling its lifelike motions. Hopefully, with some maintenance, this automaton will still be going strong in 2273.

If you’d like to Bring Back the Age of Automatons, perhaps you should study this bird bath or the “Draughtsman-Writer.”

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Robot Hand Has Good Bones

What do you get when you mix rigid and elastic polymers with a laser-scanning 3D printing technique? If you are researchers at ETH Zurich, you get robot hands with bones, ligaments, and tendons. In conjunction with a startup company, the process uses both fast-curing and slow-curing plastics, allowing parts with different structural properties to print. Of course, you could always assemble things from multiple kinds of plastics, but this new technique — vision-controlled jetting — allows the hands to print as one part. You can read the full paper from Nature or see the video below.

Wax with a low melting point encases the entire structure, acting as a support. The researchers remove the wax after the plastics cure.

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Robots: How The Pros Keep Them Safe

Robotic safety standards are designed for commercial bots, but amateur robot builders should also consider ideas like the keepout zone where a mobile robot isn’t permitted to go or how to draw out the safety perimeter space for your experimental robot arm. After all, that robot arm won’t stop crushing your fingers because you built it yourself. So, it is worth looking at the standards for industrial robots, even if your aim is fun rather than profit.

The basics of this for fixed robots like robot arms are defined in the standard R15-06. You don’t need to read the full text (because it costs $325 and is *incredibly* tedious to read), but the Association for Advancing Automation has a good background on the details. The bottom line is to ensure that a user can’t reach into an area that the robot arm might move to and provide a quick and easy way to disable the motors if someone does reach in.

Robots that move, called Industrial Mobile Robots (IMRs) or Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) bring in a whole new set of problems, though, because they are designed to move around under their own control and often share space with humans. For them, the standard is called R15.08. The AGV network has a good guide to the details, but again, it boils down to two things: make sure the robot is keeping an eye on its surroundings and that it can stop quickly enough to avoid injury.

Pi Zero FPV Robot Uses Tiny Motor & Gears

We’ve seen plenty of first-person view (FPV) robots built using the Raspberry Pi Zero, but this one from [Shane] has an interesting twist: rather than directly driving the wheels from big motors, it uses small motors and gearboxes to drive the wheels, with some of the gears being 3D printed.

[Shane] has posted the full details of this cute little robot, complete with 3D models, code, and plans for the PCB that connects the Zero to the motors. These motors are N20 ones, which are much smaller and cheaper than what we usually see used in these projects, and run faster. They also often come with a gearbox that reduces the speed to something a bit more useful. Each motor drives the two wheels on one side through a 3D printed gear for tank-style steering.

To run the whole thing off a single LiPo battery, [Shane] also designed his own Pi Hat that converted the voltage to 5 V and added a couple of H bridge chips for the motors. It is a cute little build, but the requirement for a custom Pi hat perhaps puts it beyond most beginners, who might be interested in a cheap, straightforward build like this. Does anybody have any alternatives?

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2023 Halloween Hackfest: Meet Creepsy, The Robotic People-Seeking Ghost

The 2023 Halloween Contest might be over, but we saw some great entries and clever modifications bringing projects into the Halloween spirit. One of them is Creepsy by [Hazal Mestci], a Raspberry Pi-based robotic ghost able to autonomously pick people out of a crowd and glide towards them, emitting eerie sounds as it does so.

The tech behind Creepsy (GitHub repository) originally led the somewhat less spooky existence of a mobile drink serving platform. But with a little bit of modification and the addition of a bedsheet with cutouts for sensors, the transformation into an obstacle-avoiding people-seeking spooker was complete. Key to this transformation was the Viam Python SDK, a software Swiss army knife used by robot builders everywhere. Creepsy itself was built using handy aluminum extrusion, and 3D printed parts along with the requisite suite of motors, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the 2023 Halloween Contest. Got an idea for next year? It’s never too early to get started because ideas are great, but nothing beats “done on time”!

2023 Halloween Hackfest: Organ-playing Skeleton Livens Up Halloween

Every hacker appreciates how off-the-shelf parts can be combined into something greater, and [bryan.lowder] demonstrates this beautifully with his organ-playing skeleton, a wonderful entry to our 2023 Halloween Contest!

Skelly the 3-foot-tall novelty skeleton animatedly plays Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor while perched at an old (and non-functional) Hammond organ. The small animatronic skeleton has canned motions that work very well for mock organ playing while an embedded MP3 player takes care of playing the music.

That’s not to say the project didn’t have its challenges. Integrating off-the-shelf components into a project always seems to bring its own little inconveniences. In this case, the skeleton the MP3 player both expect to be triggered with button pushes, but taping the button down wasn’t enough to get the skeleton moving when power was applied. [bryan] ended up using relays to simulate button pushes, and a 555 timer circuit to take care of incorporating a suitable delay.

As [bryan] puts it, “a technical tour de force it ain’t, but it is practical and it works and it was done on time” which is well said. Watch Skelly in action in the video, embedded below. There’s also a second video showing the homebrewed controller and MP3 player, both concealed under Skelly’s robe.

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