Animatronics In A Box

October 20, 2011 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

[Knife141] built an impressive animatronic head. He uses it mostly for volunteer activities, like getting school children excited about technology. He built a carrying trunk that fits the puppet just right, making it easy to store and to transport.

He started by making the parts for the head out of cardboard to make sure they would fit together and operate properly. These were then used as templates to cut the pieces out of half-inch plywood. A series of servos, connected either directly or with linking rods, move the mouth, eyes, eyelids, eyebrows and neck via a servo controller board.

Sound is played by a single-board computer called a RAPU via a pair of computer speakers. This board is also what sends commands to the servo controller. When [Knife141] wants to create a new act for the animatronics, he starts by writing the dialog and having a text-to-speech program turn it into an MP3. He then goes through the tedious process of choreographing the puppet to the dialog, a process that generally takes him an hour for each minute of run-time. It’s worth it though, see for yourself by watching one of his acts in the video after the break.

Looking for something a little bit more your speed? Check out this animatronic head which you can build in no time.

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Robotic Farming Means More Corn For Everyone

October 20, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 82 Comments

You know we’re all going to starve, right? If the world’s population keeps growing exponentially and food production grows linearly, we’re eventually going to find out what Soylent Green is made of. This is where [David Dorhout]’s Prospero robot farmer comes in. [David] has come up with the idea of using small autonomous robots to plant, tend and harvest fields. Right now, he’s working on stage 1: planting seeds.

A swarm of six-legged Prospero robots are dispatched to a field. There, each member of the swarm plants seeds one at a time. The robots keep in contact with each other over a wireless connection to ensure the optimal planting pattern for an entire field.

The Prospero prototype is based on the Parallax Propeller with a Ping ultrasonic sensor used to avoid obstacles. Each hexapod is equipped with a bunch of seeds, a small auger, and a supply of fertilizer for the future corn plant. The next step in the plan is to build a ‘tending’ robot that will monitor and apply nutrients if needed. Check out the Prospero video after the break.

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Creepy Delta Bot Follows Your Every Move

October 20, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

tim_tracking_interactive_mechanism

The creation you see above is the work of art student [Daniel Bertner] who is wrapping up his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He calls the incredibly intriguing, yet somewhat disturbing device “TIM”, which is short for Tracking Interactive Mechanism.

A culmination of different projects he has tinkered with over the last year or so, TIM is an interactive delta bot with an attitude. Mounted on the wall of the Art Institute’s Sullivan Galleries, TIM is as interested in you as you are in it. While passers by investigate the curious device, it watches them back, following their every movement.

The robot’s motors are controlled using an Arduino, and its ability to track people standing nearby is provided via a video stream processed with Open CV.

It really is a cool project, and we think it would make for an awesome prop in some sci-fi horror flick. Check out the video below to see TIM’s personality in action – he doesn’t like it when people stand too close!

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Creating A Voice Controlled Robotic Arm

October 19, 2011 by Mike Nathan 11 Comments

robotic_arm_voice_control

[Arthur] was laid up with a wrist injury, so he decided it would be a great time to hang out around the house and tinker with electronics, since most outdoor activities were out of the question. He picked up a robotic arm kit and assembled it to test out some code written for it that he found online. Since typing commands into a terminal was awfully cumbersome considering his injury, he figured he might as well construct a voice control system for the arm.

He documents his work in a three part series, covering the process from concept to completion. The first part centers around the creation of the vocabulary and grammar for the voice recognition system, along with the how the grammar model was trained using voice samples.

The second and third portions of his tutorial deal with the software’s decoding of his commands and the Python scripts used to translate those commands into something the robotic arm can process.

[Arthur’s] voice control system works pretty well as you can see in the video below, though he already has a wish list full of improvements he hopes to make in the near future.

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Years Of Robotic Projects – Dumped For Your Enjoyment

October 18, 2011 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

Meet tippy, just one of the multitude of robotic projects [Oneironaut] has taken on over the years. He ‘dug deep’ and put together a huge data dump of pictures and descriptions of his old robotic projects, then posted them for your enjoyment. When he wrote in to Hackaday on Monday he mentioned 33 pages of them, but he must be adding material as he finds it because we see 52 pages.

These aren’t micro-robots either. These are I’m going to chase you down because I’m your worst nightmare robots. They use heavy welded-iron frames, lead-acid batteries, and gear-motor driven locomotion. Some of his project names include The Tank, The Sentinel, and The Megatron. Bookmark the link you see above, because you’re going to want to spend some time sifting through the candy-shop of projects which seem to be too plentiful to be the hobby of just one man. Although we shouldn’t be surprised, just look at the multitude of spy-gadgets he’s come up with lately like the GPS tracker and the long-range laser night vision.

A CD Changer Made Of Wood

October 18, 2011 by Jeremy Cook 15 Comments

Although this is by no means a new hack – it was made circe 2002 – this wooden CD changer is an interesting piece of machinery. The whole thing is a simple pick-and-place device. The gripper is brilliant in it’s simplicity, using only a rubber band, wood, and a solenoid. It grips the CD by the middle hole, picks it up, and the assembly then travels to the CD tray or the stack. Everything works with DC motors and string, and several micro-switches make sure everything is picked up and dropped in the correct position.

Although we may think this is a pretty cool device, [Matthias] is quite humble about his machine’s abilities. In his estimation, although one could probably duplicate 12 CDs with relative ease, if you really wanted to duplicate a large number, it’d be best to buy one. Maybe he works in manufacturing.

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Small Tabletop Telepresence Robot

October 16, 2011 by Mike Nathan 12 Comments

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When [Peter] saw the Sparkfun Magician robot chassis in a recent new product post, he knew instantly that he had to have one for a telepresence project that had been kicking around in his head for a while.

Onto the robot chassis, he added an Arduino to provide the brains of the bot, an Adafruit motor shield for controlling the wheels, and a Pololu Wixel for wireless communications. An iPhone is mounted on the top of the robot, which communicates with his laptop using Apple’s Facetime app. The robot is controlled from his laptop as well using the Wixel, which enables him to direct the Magician chassis as if it was attached via USB.

While he thinks the robot is pretty neat and that it works well, [Peter] already has improvements in mind. The robot chassis is a bit weak on anything but smooth surfaces, so a new set of motors and wheels are likely the first changes he’ll make. He wants to add a servo-based aiming mechanism for the phone’s camera, as well as some sensors to prevent the bot from taking a nosedive off his table.

iPhone aside, this is probably one of the cheaper mobile telepresence setups we’ve seen, so we can’t wait to hear how the improvements work out, and how much they add to the robot’s cost.