Swumanoid: A Swimming Humanoid Robot

June 11, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 15 Comments

If you just happen to find yourself at the Fifth International Symposium on Aero Aqua Bio-Mechanisms this August in Taipei, you might get a chance to see this half sized swimming humanoid. Swumanoid was created by researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology by doing a 3d scan of a human, then simplifying the shapes and breaking them up to 3d printable parts. Waterproof motors are needed… since it is a swimming bot. The articulation is pretty incredible, the Sumanoid can do the crawl, like you see in the video below as well as breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly, and even doggy paddle.

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Pingbot: Adorable And Fully Documented

June 10, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 24 Comments

After building many functional but somewhat unfinished looking bots, [Tomdf] really wanted to produce something that felt “complete”. Pingbot is the result and here’s how [Tomdf] describes it:

Pingbot is a very small (38mm diameter), usb rechargeable, programmable, musical, remote control robot designed for maximum fun and danceability.

Though I wasn’t inclined to dance I did find myself smiling watching the video. Pingbot does look finished and has quite a bit of personality too. The brains inside the Pingbot are a Picaxe 08m2. With a 110mAh Li-Po battery, Pingbot can dance happily for a quite a while too. When juice is running low, just plug into your USB port for a recharge. You can find all the info and schematics on the instructible as well as the files to print your own Pingbot shell.

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Batbot: Building A Functionally Correct Bat Wing Robot

June 10, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

Batbot is a project wherein the researchers are attempting to mimic the biological structure of a bat wing for flight. The desire is to attain the maneuverability and agility you see in bat flight due to the ever changing shape of their wings. Also, bats look really cool. In attempting to mimic the structure, they have decided to use SMA based artificial muscles and steel tendons as opposed to the typical cam linkage you would see in most ornithopters.

Unfortunately, there’s no video of this bot attempting to fly. There is a video (below) of a presentation on the project that explains in detail what they are doing, and how they are doing it. It also has some really cool slow motion footage of real bats doing what they do.

[via Adafruit]

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InMoov: A 3d Printed Animatronic Hand You Can Download

June 9, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 20 Comments

[Hairygael] has been hard at work designing and building this robot structure that can be completely 3d printed. He’s admittedly not a big electronics person, so most of his focus has been on the design and construction of the bot frame. So far, he as a fully 3d printable (and available for download) hand that you can see in action after the break. Once printed, you’ll have to drill it for your own servos and add your own control system.

You can see the action is quite nice and sturdy in the video. [Hairygael] laments his lack of electronics knowledge when you see him hit roadblocks like multiple finger control. But, just as he points out in the video, we’re positive that some of you who are more familiar with that end of things will undoubtedly make this work well.

[via HackedGadgets]

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Autonomous Robot Uses An IPhone For Its Brain

June 9, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

At the beginning of the school last year, [Ryan] needed to come up with a project for his master’s thesis. Having a bachelor’s in mech. engineering and doing his graduate work in software engineering allowed [Ryan] to do something really cool for his thesis; he decided to turn an iPhone into an autonomous robot with live video streaming, remote control, and object detection.

[Ryan] started building his ArduiPhone last October with an Arduino, motor shield, and a Magician Chassis. The software is based on an iPhone network programming tutorial that opens a socket connection to a desktop PC and relays commands to an Arduino serial port.

One of the more interesting features of [Ryan]’s ArduiPhone is the ability to stream video directly from the phone to a Java application. Instead of FaceTime, [Ryan] streams videos by converting an image from the front-facing iPhone camera to a byte array, sends it over the network, and decodes the image in a Java app. It’s low-level stuff, but the video quality is excellent and something we’ll probably be seeing more of in the future.

As always, videos after the break.

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Shakerbot Leverages Inertial For Locomotion

June 7, 2012 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

This robot uses the concept of a snakeboard for getting around. [Sevag Babikian] built the project, and has gone out of his way to explain how it works.

We’d recommend skimming over his explanation, but it was the video after the break that made all things clear to us. There is a large fly-wheel at the center. This is not continuously rotating, but oscillates a few inches in either direction. This inertial change shifts the center of gravity for the entire frame, causing motion. By oscillating the front and rear axles at the appropriate time the beast can move forward in a surprisingly straight line.

It’s doing this with just three motors. [Sevag] speculates that with further testing and refinement this could be a very efficient way to move the bot around. We have our doubts about that, but we are mesmerized by the undulations and how well they really do propel the thing along.

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[Easton’s] Robot Arm Takes 2nd Place In The International Science And Engineering Fair

June 2, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

Here we see [Easton LaChappelle] getting a congratulatory handshake from the robotic arm he built. This project is aimed at human prosthetics, and we’re happy to report that [Easton] won second place in Electrical and Mechanical engineering division of this year’s International Science and Engineering Fair (PDF listing the winners).

In the video he gives us a great look of the state of the project. Since we checked in with him last he’s added a body for the arm to mount to. The arm now has shoulder movement, which uses geared DC motors along with some potentiometers for orientation feedback. For the elbow he wanted to have the same setup but ran into trouble mounting the potentiometer. His solution was to use some shapelock to mold a bracket (shapelock is the plastic you melt in water to form any shape). In addition to the aforementioned joints, the wrist, fingers, and hand have all seen improvements in how they are supported and in their performance.

We think this is amazing work for anyone, especially a 16-year-old High School student. Great job [Easton]!

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