3 DOF Open Source Robot Arm Is Just The Beginning

March 27, 2014 by James Hobson 11 Comments

Arm3-v1

[Dan Royer] of Marginally Clever had a dream. A dream to build an open-source 6 DOF robot that anyone can make! To do so, he’s been learning robotics for the past two years, and has just finished the first step — he’s designed and built an open source 3 DOF palletizing robot!

He’s based this little guy off of the commercial ABB 460 palletizing robot, which is a tried and true industrial robot. It features all laser cut parts, a few nuts and bolts, some stepper motors and an Arduino UNO for the brain. He’s released all of the design files on Thingiverse and the firmware on GitHub — yet another project we’d like to build if only we had a laser cutter!

And don’t worry, the Arduino UNO is only being used for this first prototype — he’s already started writing code for the RUMBA (Reprap Universal Mega Board with Allegro-driver) controller for revision 2.

Stick around to see it write its first greeting with a marker — Hello World!

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Open Source Humanoid Robot Is Awesom-o

March 25, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

awesome-o

Coming from a lab in France is The Poppy Project, an open source humanoid robot that’s at least as cool as ASIMO.

Poppy was designed as an affordable bipedal robot for use in education and art. It’s a small robot at just over 80 cm in height, but it can walk, move its arms, rotate its torso, and interact with bags-of-meat humans with two cameras and an LCD face.

Although Poppy is open source, that doesn’t mean it’s exactly cheap; the current design includes twenty-one Robotis Dynamixels MX-28 robotic actuators, actually servos with magnetic encoders, temperature sensor, and an ARM microcontroller. These actuators sell for about $200, meaning Poppy contains $4000 in motors alone. The estimated cost of the entire robot is €7500-8000, or about $10,000 to $11,000 USD.

Still, there’s an incredible software platform that comes along with Poppy, and being open source any enterprising engineer can take up the project and attempt to bring the costs down. We’d love to take one out for a walk. Just get rid of the hands. That’s too far down the uncanny valley for us. Video below.

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Soft Robotics, Silicone Rubber, And Amazing Castings

March 24, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Most of the robotics projects we see around here are heavy, metallic machines that move with exacting precision with steppers, servos, motors, and electronics. [Matthew] is another breed of roboticist, and created a quadruped robot with no hard moving parts.

[Matthew] calls his creation the Glaucus, after the blue sea slug Glaucus atlanticus. Inside this silicone rubber blob are a series of voids, allowing compressed air to expand the legs, gently inching Glaucus across a table under manual or automatic control.

Even though no one seems to do it, making a few molds for casting on a 3D printer is actually pretty easy. [Matthew] is taking this technique to an extreme, though: First, a mold for the interior pressure bladders are printed, then a positive of this print made in silicone rubber. These silicone molds – four of them, for the left, right, top and bottom – are then filled with wax, and the wax parts reassembled inside the final ‘body’ mold. It’s an amazing amount of work to make just one of these soft robots, but once the molds and masters are made, [Matthew] can pop out a soft robot every few hours or so.

There’s a lot more info on Glaucus over on the official site for the build, and a somewhat simpler ‘compressed air and silicone rubber’ tentacle [Matthew] built showing off the mechanics. Video below.

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Building The Mountainbeest

March 9, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

mounainbeest-pic

Builder extraordinaire and Hackaday alum [Jeremy] was asked by a friend about “doing something really crazy” for his local Makerfaire this year. That Makerfaire clock is ticking down, and not wanting to build awesome from scratch, referred his friend to a few of the temporarily shelved projects from the last year. The winning incomplete build was the Mountainbeest, a four-legged mechanical walker inspired by [Theo Jansen]’s Strandbeest.

We’ve seen the beginnings of the Mountainbeest before, starting with [Jeremy] building the linkages for one leg. This build turned into two legs and now it’s a full-on quadruped, theoretically capable of rambling over the lush mountains in [Jeremy]’s backyard.

The plan now is for [Jeremy] to get is Beest walking with the help of windshield wiper motors left over from a failed hexapod build. He’s not ging all the details yet, but it looks like the power train will be made out of bike parts. Video of the current state of the project below.

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Real Or Fake? The Amazing Ping-Pong Robot

March 8, 2014 by Nick Conn 60 Comments

Would you like to play a robot in ping pong (translated)? We sure would. Inspired by an upcoming face-off between man and machine, [Jakob] wrote in to tell us about [Ulf Hoffmann’s] ping-pong playing robot. If you ever wanted to play ping-pong when no one else was around or are just sick and tired of playing against the same opponents this project is for you. Boy is this thing amazing; you simply must see the robot in action in the video after the break.

While the robot’s build is not documented all in one post, [Ulf Hoffmann’s] blog has many videos and mini posts about how he went about building the paddle wielding wonder. The build runs the range from first ideas, to hand-drawn sketches, to the technical drawings seen above. From these the parts of the arm were built, but the mechanical assembly is only one portion of the project. It also required software to track the ball and calculate how to properly return it. Be sure to browse through his past posts, there is a wealth of information there.

Also be sure to check in on March 11th to see who wins the epic face-off between man and machine. See the trailer (the second embedded video) after the break.

UPDATE: Many commentators are calling this one a fake. It’s so sad to think that, because this is a really cool project. But we’ve changed the title and are asking you to weigh in on whether you think it is real or fake. We’ve also contacted [Ulf] and asked if it is real hardware, or a CGI enhanced video. We’ll let you know if/when we hear back from him.

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Sparkfun’s AVC 2014: Robots, Copters, And Red Balloons Of Death, Oh My!

February 27, 2014 by Adam Fabio 8 Comments

SparkFunAVC2014

Registration is open for Sparkfun’s 2014 Autonomous Vehicle Competition (AVC)! Every year the fine folks at Sparkfun invite people to bring their robots, rovers, and drones to Colorado to see who is the king of the hill – or reservoir as the case may be. We see plenty of robots here at Hackaday, but precious few of them are autonomous. To us that means capable of completing complex tasks without human intervention. Sparkfun has spent the last five years working toward changing that. Each year the robots get more complex and complete increasingly difficult tasks.

The competition is essentially a race through the Boulder reservoir. Time is key, though there are multiple ways to gain bonus points. For aerial vehicles there are two classes: fixed and rotary wing. Planes fall under the fixed wing category. Helicopters, gyrocopters, tricopters, quadcopters, and beyond fall into rotary wing. We’re holding out hope that e-volo shows up with their Octadecacopter. Ground vehicles have a few more class options. Micro/PBR class is for robots with a build cost less than $350 total, or small enough to fit into box that’s 10″x6″x4″. The doping class is unlimited. Sparkfun even mentions costs over $1kUSD+, and weights over 25LBS. Non-Traditional Locomotion class is for walkers, WildCats and the like. Peloton is Sparkfun’s class for robots that don’t fit into the other classes.

Sparkfun is also making a few changes to the course this year. A white chalk line will be drawn through the course, so robots don’t have to rely on GPS alone for navigation. We’re hoping to see at least a few vision systems using that chalk line. Aerial robots will have to contend with three “Red Balloons of Death”. Robots can navigate around the balloons without penalty. The balloons can be bumped or even popped for bonus points, but the robot must do this with its own body. Projectile weapons are not allowed. To say we’re excited about the AVC would be an understatement. As much as we enjoy watching the big players at competitions like the DARPA Robotics Challenge, we love seeing individuals and small teams of hobbyists compete every year at the AVC. Click on past the break for Sparkfun’s AVC 2013 wrap up video.

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Robot Foosball Will Kick Your Butt If You Play Slowly

February 25, 2014 by James Hobson 4 Comments

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Sometimes we find a project that is so far outside of our realm of experience, it just makes us sit back and think “wow”. This is definitely one of those projects. [Saba] has created a Robotic Foosball set that learns.

[Saba Khalilnaji] is a recent engineering graduate from UC Berkeley, and his passion is robotics. After taking an Artificial Intelligence class during his degree (you can take it online through edX!), he has decided to dabble in AI by building this awesome robot Foosball set.

His “basic” understanding of machine learning includes a few topics such as Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning. For this project he’s testing out a real-world application of Reinforcement Learning using the Markov Decision Process or MDP for short. At an extremely top level description it works by programming an agent to learn from the consequences of its actions in a given environment. There are a set of states, actions, probabilities for given state and action, and rewards for specific state and action sets.

Before we butcher the explanation anymore, check out his blog for more information — and watch the following video.

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