Cramming For Sparkfun’s Autonomous Vehicle Competition

June 20, 2012 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

[Paul Breed] participated in this year’s Autonomous Vehicles Contest put on by SparkFun Electronics. As with most projects, the deadline really snuck up on him and he ended up cramming a bunch of code development into the waning days before the competition. His experiences are shared in this recent blog post.

One big part of the hardware is a laser range finder used for wall following. This is explained well in the video after the break, but you can see the side-pointing blue box in the image above. [Paul] also spent a lot of time preparing for the checkpoint portion of the course where the vehicle would need to pass through a red hoop. He worked long and hard on an image processing setup to find and navigate those hoops before learning that they would be positioned at known locations and it would be much easier to use a path following technique to complete the challenge.

He had a few follies along the way. At one point during debugging the car — which was connected to his laptop via Ethernet — it got away from him. This ripped the NIC right out of the back of his computer. And on the day of the event he had some low battery issues that zapped his laser calibrations. But [Paul] rolled with the punches and ended having what sounds like a really exciting experience participating in the contest.

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Salvaged Robot Arm Makes A Big 3d Printer

June 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

Wow, building a precision 3d printer is amazingly easy if you can get your hands on an industrial-quality robot arm. [Dane] wrote in to tell us about this huge extruder printer made from an ’80s-era SCARA robot arm. It is capable of printing objects as large as 25″x12″x6.5″.

This 190 pound beast was acquired during a lab clean out. It was mechanically intact, but missing all of the control hardware. Building controllers was a bit of a challenge since the it’s designed with servo motors and precision feedback sensors. This is different from modern 3d printers which use stepper motors and no feedback sensors. A working controller was built up one component at a time, with a heated bed added to the mix to help prevent warping with large builds. We love the Frankenstein look of the controller hardware, which was mounted hodge-podge as each new module was brought online.

You can see some printing action in the clip after the break. A Linux box takes a design and spits out control instructions to the hardware.

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Jamming Gripper That’s Super Easy To Build

June 15, 2012 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

This is the simplest version of a jamming gripper that we’ve seen yet. The only component that might not be readily available is the pump in the upper left, but the rest is all hardware or grocery store stuff. It’s based on the concept we saw from a research video where the air in a bladder full of coffee grounds is removed to grip an item. In this case the bladder is a party balloon which is held in place by parts from a cheap shower head. A theaded-to-barbed right angle connector makes it easy to connect the vinyl tubing up to the pump.

The video after the break shows that this works quite well for small items. But we see a lot of downward force is exerted to firmly embed them in the grounds. We’re not sure if this is par for the course, or if it would work a bit better if more air were in the bladder initially. This other jamming gripper build uses a servo to release pressure from the system, and we think that might be of help here too.

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Two Motor Walking Robot With A TI Launchpad

June 13, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

Last month, [Vinod] bought a pair of hobby servos on a whim. These servos sat on the shelf for a while until [Vinod] asked his friend what he should use them for. [Achu] suggested using the servos for a walking robot, so after checking out a few YouTube videos of some servo-powered walkers, [Vinod] built his own.

The robot is built around a TI Launchpad housing an MSP430 microcontroller. An extremely simple circuit (just some servos and a cap) power the robot along by alternating the direction the servos turn.

[Vinod]’s two-servo locomotion mechanism is very reminiscent of BEAM robots, extremely simple walking (or rolling) robots made out of just a few logic circuits. This TI Launchpad is in some ways even simpler; where [Mark Tilden]’s Walkman robot used several 74-series octal buffers, [Vinod]’s project is just a Lanuchpad and a pair of servos.

All the code is available on [Vinod]’s blog. Check out the demo video after the break.

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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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