Star Wars Pit Droid Has A Jetson Brain

August 6, 2023 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

In the Star Wars universe, pit droids are little foldable robots that perform automated repairs on spacecraft and the like. They were introduced in 1999’s The Phantom Menace, and beyond the podracing scenes, are probably the only good thing to come out of that particular film.

[Goran Vuksic] wanted a pit droid of his own, and reasoned that if he was going to go through the trouble of sanding and painting all the 3D printed components so they look like the real bot, he might as well add some smarts to it. While this droid won’t be fixing podracers anytime soon, its onboard Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit does pack a considerable amount of processing under that dome.

A webcam mounted in the bot’s eye socket is connected to the Jetson, which is running an image detection and identification routine based on the example code provided by NVIDIA. The single-board computer uses a relay to blink some LEDs on and off when a human is detected, and a pair of servos pan-and-tilt the bot’s head towards whoever has caught its gaze.

It’s no surprise that [Goran] picked the Jetson Orin over competing SBCs for this task — in our review of the Orin Nano Developer Kit a few months ago, we found it was able to hit nearly 200 frames per second while performing this sort of real-time image analysis. So there’s plenty of room to grow should he want to integrate more complex image recognition tasks.

For example, he could follow in the footsteps of [Kris Kersey], and put a functional data overlay on top of the video to give his bot Iron Man vision.

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Browser-Based Robot Dog Simulator In ~800 Lines Of Code

August 5, 2023 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

[Sergii] has been learning about robot simulation and wrote up a basic simulator for a robodog platform: the Unitree A1. It only took about 800 lines of code to do so, which probably makes it a good place to start if one is headed in a similar direction.

Right now, [Sergii]’s simulator is an interactive physics model than runs in the browser. Software-wise, once the model of the robot exists the Rapier JavaScript physics engine takes care of the physics simulation. The robot’s physical layout comes from the manufacturer’s repository, so it doesn’t need to be created from scratch.

To make the tool useful, the application has two models of the robot, side by side. The one on the left is the control model, and has interactive sliders for limb positions. All movements on the control model are transmitted to the model on the right, which is the simulation model, setting the pose. The simulation model is the one that actually models the physics and gravity of all the desired motions and positions. [Sergii]’s next step is to use the simulator to design and implement a simple walking gait controller, and we look forward to how that turns out.

If Unitree sounds familiar to you, it might be because we recently covered how an unofficial SDK was able to open up some otherwise-unavailable features on the robodogs, so check that out if you want to get a little more out of what you paid for.

Ask Hackaday: What’s The Deal With Humanoid Robots?

July 31, 2023 by Lewin Day 43 Comments

When the term ‘robot’ gets tossed around, our minds usually race to the image of a humanoid machine. These robots are a fixture in pop culture, and often held up as some sort of ideal form.

Yet, one might ask, why the fixation? While we are naturally obsessed with recreating robots in our own image, are these bipedal machines the perfect solution we imagine them to be?

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A New Educational Robotics Platform

July 30, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

When looking for electronics projects to use in educational settings, there is no shortage of simple, lightweight, and easily-accessible systems to choose from. From robotic arms, drones, walking robots, and wheeled robots, there is a vast array of options. But as technology marches on, the robotics platforms need to keep up as well. This turtle-style wheeled robot called the Trundlebot uses the latest in affordable microcontrollers on a relatively simple, expandable platform for the most up-to-date educational experience.

The robot is built around a Raspberry Pi Pico, with two low-cost stepper motors to drive the wheeled platform. The chassis can be built out of any material that can be cut in a laser cutter, but for anyone without this sort of tool it is also fairly easy to cut the shapes out by hand. The robot’s functionality can be controlled through Python code, and it is compatible with the WizFi360-EVB-Pico which allows it to be remote controlled through a web application. The web interface allows easy programming of commands for the Trundlebot, including a drag-and-drop feature for controlling the robot.

With all of these features, wireless connectivity, and a modern microcontroller at the core, it is an excellent platform for educational robotics. From here it wouldn’t be too hard to develop line-follower robots, obstacle-avoiding robots, or maze-solving robots. Other components can easily be installed to facilitate these designs as well. If you’re looking for a different style robot, although not expressly for educational purposes this robotic arm can be produced for under $60.

Steel For Your Fighting Robot

July 23, 2023 by Jenny List 8 Comments

The job of processing video after a large event must be a thankless one for whichever volunteer upon whose shoulders it falls, and thus it’s not unusual for talks at larger events to end up online much later than the event itself. Electromagnetic Field 2022 was last year, but they have continued to drop new videos. Among the latest batch is one from [Jennifer Herchenroeder], in which she discusses the steel used in her team’s BattleBot, Hijinx (Edit: her EMF talk was cut short due to time pressures, so she re-recorded it in full after the event and we’ve replaced the link. The EMF video meanwhile is here). The result is a fascinating introduction to the metallurgy of iron and steel, and is well worth a watch.

To fully understand the selection of armor steel it’s necessary to start from first principles with iron, to look at its various allotropes, and understand something of how those allotropes form and mix in the steel making and metalworking processes. We’re treated to a full description of the various tempering and hardening processes, before a panel-by-panel rundown of the various steels used by Hijinx.

For a Hackaday writer with a past in robot combat it’s fascinating to see how the design of robots has evolved over the decades since the British Robot Wars, and it’s particularly nice to see the current generation as part of our community. However, if you’ve tempted yourself, bear in mind that it’s not all plain sailing.

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Mapping The Depths With An Autonomous Solar Boat

July 23, 2023 by Tom Nardi 17 Comments

Ever look out at a pond, stream, or river, and wonder how deep it is? For large bodies of water that are considered navigable, it’s easy enough to pull up a chart and find out. But what if there’s no public data for the area you’re interested in?

Well, you could spend all day on a little boat taking depth readings and making your own chart, but if you’re anything like [Clay] you could build a solar-powered autonomous robot to do it for you. He’s been working on the boat, which he calls Gumption Trap, for the better part of a year now. If we had to guess, we’d say the experience of designing and building it has ended up being a bit more interesting to him than the actual depth of the water — but that’s fine by us.

The design of the boat is surprisingly economical, as far as marine designs go. Two capped four-inch PVC pipes are used as pontoons, and 3D printed brackets attach those to an aluminum extrusion frame that holds the electronics and solar panel high above the water. This arrangement provides an exceptionally stable platform that would be all but impossible to flip under normal circumstances.

Around the back of the craft, there’s a pair of massive 3D printed thrusters, complete with some remarkably chunky printed propellers. The lack of rudders keeps things simple, with differential thrust between the two motors enough to keep the Gumption pointed in the right direction.

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Tentacle Robot Is Like An Elephant Trunk

July 6, 2023 by Al Williams 1 Comment

It sounds like bad science fiction or anime, but researchers are creating helical-artificial fibrous muscle structured tubular soft actuators. What? Oh, tentacle robot arms. Got it.

The researchers at Westlake University in China found inspiration in elephant trunks. Elephant trunks are entirely devoid of bone but use a tubular muscle structure. By deforming certain muscles, complex motion is possible. After understanding how they work, it was just a matter of making a similar structure from artificial muscle fibers.

The resulting actuator uses smart materials and has eleven different morphing modes — more than other attempts to build similar structures. The fabrication sounds difficult, it involves stretching chemically reactive materials over a form with specific winding angles.

The fibers react to light. Depending on the configuration, the stalk can seek light or avoid light. We were hoping the “Materials and Methods” section would give some ideas of how to do this ourselves, but it looks like you’d need some uncommon liquid crystal materials, and you’d also have to work out some of the details.

Animatronic tentacles are usually complex cable affairs. However, we have seen some soft robots in the past, too.