Solar Powered Robot Mows Your Lawn While You Chill Indoors

April 7, 2013 by Mike Szczys 47 Comments

We’ve heard quite a number of radio ads lately trying to sell an automatic lawn mowing robot (like a Roomba for your grass). But wouldn’t it be a lot more fun to hack your own from an existing lawnmower? That’s what [Daniel Epperson] did. In fact, the project has been ongoing for years. But he wrote in to share the latest development which adds solar charging capabilities to the robot mower.

First off let’s discuss the fact that this is not an electric lawnmower. This is the Prius of lawnmowers, bringing together hybrid technology to cut the grass with the gasoline powered motor, and to propel the rig with electricity. [Danny’s] worked hard to shoe-horn just about every feature imaginable (other than autonomy) into the thing, and that’s why the batteries can be charged from mains, an alternator powered by the gas motor, and now from the PV panel mounted on top of it. Get the entire project overview in his roundup post.

This a wireless video feed and the mower is driven by remote-controlled. So you can give your yard a trim without getting sweaty. After the jump we’ve embedded a clip of an earlier revision demonstrating that remote control. If you’re not interest in having all the features you could simply build an analog version.

Continue reading “Solar Powered Robot Mows Your Lawn While You Chill Indoors” →

Adding An Optical Mouse Sensor To An Autonomous Vehicle

April 3, 2013 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

[Tim] is getting his drone ready for SparkFun’s 2013 Autonomous Vehicle Competition on June 8th. He has a pretty good start, but was having some problems accurately measuring travel distance. The technique he chose for the task was to glue magnets onto the axles of the vehicle and monitor them with a hall effect sensor. Those sensors are finicky and a few problems during testing prompted him to look at a redundant system. Right now he’s experimenting with adding an optical mouse sensor to the autonomous vehicle.

Recently we saw the same concept used, but it was meant for tracking movement of a full-sized automobile. If it can work in that application it should be perfect here since the vehicle is much closer to the ground and will be used in ideal conditions (flat pavement with clear weather). [Tim] cracked open an old HP mouse he had lying around. Inside he found an Avago ADNS-5020 sensor. After grabbing the datasheet he discovered that it’s simply an I2C device. Above you can see the Arduino Leonardo he used for the first tests.

[Tim] coded functions to monitor the chip, including some interesting ones like measuring how in-focus the surface below the sensor is. This brings up a question, is there limit on how fast the vehicle can travel before the sensor fails to report back accurately?

Treasure Trove Of Swarm Robotics Research

March 30, 2013 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

swarm-robotics

The screen capture above shows a group of swarm robots working together to move the blue box from the left side of the frame over to the right. It’s just one of many demonstrations shown in the video clip after the break. The clip is a quick sampling of the many swarm robotics research projects going on at the University of Sheffield’s Natural Robotics Lab.

The main focus for all of the research is to see what can be accomplished by getting a large group of relatively simple machines to work together. Each device has a microcontroller brain, camera, accelerometer, proximity sensors, and a microphone. By mixing and matching the use of available components they can test different concepts which will be useful in creating utility robot swarms for real-world tasks. The video shows off the robots grouping themselves by like characteristic, a test called segregation (the purpose of this didn’t resonate with us), and group tasks like moving that box. The nice thing is that a series of white papers is available at the post linked above (click on the PDF icon) so that you may dig deeper if these projects are of interest to you.

Continue reading “Treasure Trove Of Swarm Robotics Research” →

Robot Steals Soda From The Vending Machine

March 27, 2013 by Mike Szczys 45 Comments

robot-steals-soda

It’s very hard to tell from this photo because of the super bright blue LEDs, but this soda machine is being robbed by a robot.

We don’t condone theft, but neither does the creator of the project. [Ioduremetallique] is really just problem solving; doing something because he can. And we’d bet this type of thing will end up landing him a high-paying job some day (we’re assuming he’s currently in school).

The project is shown off in the video after the break. The gist of it is that a compact robot arm is put into the drop area of a vending machine. After the flap is closed the wired remote control is used to raise up the telescoping arm, and grip the soda can with the grippers. It’s brilliant and devious all at the same time. The entire video is in French, but the YouTube captions translator actually worked quite well with this video. To turn it one, use the ‘CC’ icon on the bottom of the video. We had to select the French captions before it would allow us to chose English from the translated captions list. About four minutes in we get a great look at the hardware itself… a super hack!

Continue reading “Robot Steals Soda From The Vending Machine” →

Robot Bartender Mixes A Mean Drink

March 25, 2013 by Ryan Fitzpatrick 11 Comments

Back in 2002, [Dave] came across a discarded PUMA robotic arm and quickly set his sights on turning it into a bartender to serve drinks at his parties. Unfortunately, the arm was far from operational and being an engineer at his day job meant that working on this project was the last thing he wanted to do when he came home. So, progress trickled along slowly for years. He eventually announced a public deadline to spur him to action, and this years Pi(e) party saw the official debut of ‘Sir-Mix-a-Bot’ – the robot bartender .

With the exception of having to build a new hand for it, mechanically, the arm was still in good condition when [Dave] found it. The electronics were another story however. Using some off the shelf components and his own know-how, [Dave] had to custom build all the controls. The software was written from scratch as well. (He lucked out and had help from his brother who was taking a Ph.D. program in robotics at the time).

As if the robotics aspect of the project wasn’t enough, [Dave] even created a beautiful custom table that both houses and displays his masterpiece. The quality of craftsmanship on his table alone is worth the time to check this out – there’s a short video after the break.

[Thanks Dave]

Continue reading “Robot Bartender Mixes A Mean Drink” →

Hacked Interactive R2D2 Controlled By Raspberry Pi

March 23, 2013 by Ryan Fitzpatrick 2 Comments

hacked-R2D2-controlled-by-raspberry-pi

Ah R2D2. Probably one of the most recognized little robots on the planet. There have to be a hundred different toys of R2 out there, but one of the more impressive is the 30th Anniversary Interactive edition. Complete with all kinds of bells and whistles, it’s about as realistic as they come. One Star Wars fan found himself in possession of a broken Interactive R2, and with his girlfriend’s birthday coming up, decided to do a little droid surgery to create the ultimate gift.

Giving Anakin a run for his money, all the controls for this R2 unit were custom built. A Raspberry Pi running Rasbian acts as the brain. Facial recognition was implemented using OpenCV. Voice commands in either English or Chinese were made possible by PocketSphinx. Some of the other features he included are: message recording and playback, ultrasonic distance detection, motion detection, wifi, and a rechargeable battery. Many of those features were included in the original toy, but since this unit was broken, had to be rebuilt from scratch.

In the end, it must have impressed his girlfriend – she’s now his wife. Good work Jedi. Check out some build photos and a video demonstration after the break.

Continue reading “Hacked Interactive R2D2 Controlled By Raspberry Pi” →

Robotic Rat Torments And Depresses Real Rats

March 18, 2013 by Ryan Fitzpatrick 92 Comments

robotic-rat-torments-real-rats

Animal testing has always been a subject of much debate. On one hand, it allows us to determine if something is probably safe for humans. On the other hand, it’s injuring and killing the very animals that help us escape that same fate. Any way you look at it, be thankful you’re not a lab rat. Being a mammal, they share a similar physiology with us. They are also easy to breed and easy to dispose of. These characteristics make them the prime subject for testing the safety of drugs and treatments that might one day be used on humans. Scientists at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, have created a new rat nemesis – the WR-3, a robot designed specifically to stress and depress lab animals in the name of science.

Depression isn’t normally something rats have to worry about in the wild. So, the WR-3 tries to instill it upon them. The robot has three functions: attacking continuously (relentlessly rams the victim), attacking interactively (attacks for 5 seconds whenever the victim moves, then stops), and chasing (stays right next to the victim but never attacks). The scientists found that the best way to make the rats depressed was to attack them continuously in their youth, then attack interactively as they get older.

With the data the scientists gain from these new experiments, they hope to learn more about human depression and hopefully come up with more successful treatments. There isn’t a lot of specific information we could find about the WR-3, but we’ll keep you posted.

[via Gizmodo]