Robots Hacks

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Robot Battle For The Big Leagues: Valkyrie And The DARPA Challenge

December 12, 2013 by 30 Comments

valkyrieRobot

Even though NASA’s Johnson Space Center’s impressive build for the upcoming DARPA Robotics Challenge is one of many entries, it has to be one of the coolest. The gang at IEEE Spectrum got a sneak peak of the robot dubbed “Valkyrie”, which at 1.9m and 125kg boasts 44 degrees of freedom while managing to look like a finished product ready to roll off the shelf. We can expect to see other custom robots at the challenge, but a number of teams will compete with a Boston Dynamics Atlas Robot, which we’ve covered a couple times this year.

A few readers are probably polishing their pitchforks in anticipation of shouting “Not a hack!” but before you do, take a look at the tasks for the robots in this challenge and consider how new this territory is. To that end, the NASA JSC crew seem to have prepared for resolving catastrophes, even if it means throwing together a solution. They’ve designed the limbs for quick removal and even reversibility: the arms are identical and only slight adjustments are required to turn a left arm into a right. Unlike the Atlas, which requires a tether, Valkyrie is battery-operated, and it can run for around an hour before someone needs to crack open the torso and swap in a new one, Iron Man film–style.

The team was also determined to make Valkyrie seem more human, so they added a soft fabric layer to serve as a kind of clothing. According to IEEE Spectrum, it’s even getting custom made footwear from DC Shoes.There are some utilitarian compromises, though: Valkyrie has adopted a shortcut taken by time-constrained animators in many a cartoon, choosing three fingers per hand instead of four. Make sure you watch the video after the break for a closer look.

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A Kinect Controlled Robotic Hand

December 10, 2013 by 5 Comments

hand

It’s that time of year again when the senior design projects come rolling in. [Ben], along with his partners [Cameron], [Carlton] and [Chris] have been working on something very ambitious since September: a robotic arm and hand controlled by a Kinect that copies the user’s movements.

The arm is a Lynxmotion AL5D, but instead of the included software suite the guys rolled their own means of controlling this arm with the help of an Arduino. The Kinect captures the user’s arm position and turns that into data for the arm’s servos.

A Kinect’s resolution is limited, of course, so for everything beyond the wrist, the team turned to another technology – flex resistors. A glove combined with these flex resistors and an accelerometer provides all the data of the position of the hand and fingers in space.

This data is sent over to another Arduino on the build for orienting the wrist and fingers of the robotic arm. As shown in the videos below, the arm performs remarkably well, just like the best Waldos you’ve ever seen.

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Disk-O-Mat: A Photobooth For Records

December 10, 2013 by 15 Comments

record

A photo booth is a simple concept – drop in a coin and get a few pictures in a couple of minutes. That’s only a visual record, though. What if you wanted to record audio? Thus the disk-o-mat was born.

The disk-o-mat is one of [flo]’s projects. In place of the miniaturized dark room found in a photo booth, [flo] put a record cutting setup. The 7″ records are polycarbonate sheets, each transferred to the turntable by a vacuum gripper. When the plastic disk is loaded, a stylus is set down on the disk and the record light goes on.

There isn’t a computer or any other digital means of saving audio and playing it back later. Everything is done just as how 45s – or more specifically, really old 78s – were cut; whatever goes into the microphone is cut directly into plastic.

The disk-o-mat was originally built in 2009, and has traveled to a few venues. [flo] is working on speeding up the process and making the machine a bit more reliable. Still, an awesome build and an awesome concept.

Videos below.

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Will Dance For Bitcoin

December 7, 2013 by 6 Comments

It seems that Bitcoin is all over the news nowadays, but the Bitcoin Bot is probably the first robot that will dance for Bitcoins.

[Ryan] at HeatSync Labs in Mesa, AZ, is a fan of the cryptocurrency, and decided to build something to accept it. He discovered that Coinbase, a popular hosted Bitcoin wallet service, has a callback API. This causes Coinbase to fetch a specified URL any time a wallet receives a transaction, and provides information on the transaction in the request. A Python script handles these requests and updates a running count of the BTC balance sent to the robot’s wallet.

On the hardware side, an Arduino with an Ethernet Shield checks the balance. If it has changed, it calls the dance function and the luau girl dances.

The robot sits in the window of the hackerspace, so anyone passing by can read about Bitcoin and make a donation. The source code is on Github, and a video follows after the break.

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Compliant Robot Gripper Won’t Scramble Your Eggs

December 3, 2013 by 24 Comments

[Chiprobot] has created an amazing compliant gripper.  Designing robot hands (or end effectors) can be a perilous task. It is easy to give robots big, good, strong hands. Strong grippers have to be controlled by sensors. However, sensors can’t always be relied upon to ensure those hands don’t crush anything they touch. Hardware fails, software has bugs. Sometimes the best solution is a clever mechanical design, one which ensures a gripper will conform to the object it is gripping. We’ve seen “jamming” grippers before. (so named for their use of a granular substance which jams around the object being gripped).

[Chiprobot’s] gripper is something entirely different. He designed his gripper in blender, and printed it out with his Ultimaker 3D printer. The material is flexible PLA. Three plastic “fingers” wrap around the object being gripped. The fingers are made up of two strips of printed plastic connected by wire linkages. The flexible plastic of the fingers create a leaf spring design. The fingers are attached to a linear actuator at the center point of the gripper. The linear actuator itself is another great hack. [Chiprobot] created it from a servo and an empty glue stick.  As the linear actuator is pulled in, the fingers pull around  any object in their grip. The end result is a grip strong enough to hold an egg while shaking it, but not strong enough to break the egg.

We would like to see the gripper gripping other objects, as eggs can be surprisingly strong. We’ve all seen the physics trick where squeezing an egg with bare hands doesn’t break it, yet squeezing an egg while wearing a ring causes it to crack much… like an egg.

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Build And Control Your Own Robot Army

November 29, 2013 by 10 Comments

deltas

[Sarah Petkus] has a simple dream. She wants to build and command her own delta robot army. It all began with an illustration she drew of a woman hovering over a field of flowers. The flowers in this case had incandescent light bulbs as blooms. [Sarah] decided to create her image in the real world as an interactive art installation. Her first attempts at moving light flowers were based on a pulley system, which was unreliable and not exactly the graceful movement she imagined. Eventually [Sarah] discovered inverted delta robots. She changed her flower design to a delta, and began building her own delta robots out of parts she had around the house.

A chance meeting with the folks at SYN Shop hackerspace in Las Vegas, NV kicked the project into high gear. [Sarah] switched from using R/C ball links as joints to a simple ball bearing joint. She created her entire design in CAD software and printed it on the hackerspace’s 3d printer. She now has six working prototypes. The robots are all controlled via I2C by an Arduino compatible Nymph board. Six robots doesn’t exactly constitute an army, so [Sarah] had to find a new way to fund her project. She’s currently setting up a project for Kickstarter. [Sarah] will be selling kits for her robots, with the proceeds going toward the realization of her dream of a field of robotic light bulb flowers – Assuming the deltas don’t become sentient and try to take over the world first. [Sarah] posts progress updates to her blog, and has a dedicated site (which we featured on Sunday as part of a Links post) for information about her upcoming Kickstarter campaign.

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Robot Painter Works Like A Photobooth

November 26, 2013 by 6 Comments

robot-painter-photo-booth

[Ben], [David], [Drew], [Kayla], and [Peter] built a robotic artist as their senior design project. This mashes up a bunch of different project ideas, but the thing we like the most about it is that it works much like a photo booth that produces a painting. A Raspberry Pi uses a webcam to snap the picture, converts the image to three colors (plus the white background of the canvas) and sets the robot in motion. The team laments that initial testing of the completed project (seen in the clip below) worked out quite well but took hours to produce the painting. What do they expect? It’s art!

This is quite a bit different from the WaterColorBot (whose manufacturing process we just looked in on yesterday). WaterColorBot uses a flat canvas and a gantry system. This offering, which is called PICASSAU, uses an upright canvas with the paintbrush mounted in much the same way as a plotter robot. The biggest difference is that there is the ability to pivot the paint brush in order to pick up more paint, and for cleaning in between color changes.

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