Trobot: Kickstarting The 6-axis Minature Robot Arm

June 7, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Having already made it to three hardware development versions, [Toby Baumgartner] is looking for some financial backing to make version four of this robot arm possible.

He’s modelling the arm after much larger ABB industrial robots. Like those, it mounts on a stationary base, and features movement along six axes. The first couple of iterations even used ABB Software’s RobotStudio for control. This is the same software used by the full-sized robots, and features a special design language to integrate the robots into just about any production facility.

We don’t think the need for high-end software used with these small manipulator arms is very great, but we could see the finished product used for small-scale assembly line work some day. In the mean time these might be useful in your own projects. [Toby] has been using an mBed microcontroller board as the hardware driver. It communicates with the computer via an Ethernet connection and he’s even working on an Android interface right now.

Check out a video demonstration of version 2 and 3 embedded after the break.

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Programming Robots Like You Would Train A Pet

June 4, 2011 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Jim] has been working with a team from various Universities to develop an intuitive way to guide and train assistance robots. They focused on one particular technique, training a robot to follow on a leash in the same way you would a pet dog (PDF).

He was inspired to send in a link to his research after reading about the Kinect-powered shopping card robot. He figures that that project is similar to his own, but his does have several added benefits. The first being that if a robot is on a leash, everyone knows who that bot is following or assisting. But there is the added benefit of the user needing no training whatsoever. That’s because the act of walking a dog on a leash is commonplace in developed societies; you may not have ever owned a dog, but you’ve seen others walking them on leashes numerous times and could do so yourself without any training.

The leash connects to a sensor-filled turret in the center of the robot’s body. The bot can sense when, and in which direction the user is pulling the leash. There’s also an emergency kill switch on the handle for added functionality. Take a look at some of the test video after the break to see how quickly humans can adapt to this type of user interface.

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Kinect-driven Cart Makes Shopping A Snap

June 3, 2011 by Mike Nathan 21 Comments

wi_go

[Luis de Matos] is working on a neat Kinect project called Wi-GO that aims, as many do, to enhance the lives of individuals with disabilities. While the Wi-GO project is geared towards disabled persons, it can be quite helpful to the elderly and pregnant women as well.

Wi-GO is a motorized shopping cart with a Kinect sensor mounted on the back. The sensor interfaces with a laptop and functions much as you would as you would expect, scanning the area in front of the cart for objects and people. Once it identifies the individual it is meant to help, the cart diligently follows behind as the person goes about their typical shopping routine. The robot keeps a safe distance to avoid collisions, but remains within reach so that it can be used to carry goods.

If you take a look a the video below, you can see Wi-GO in action. It starts off by showing how difficult it would be for an individual in a wheel chair to use a shopping cart alone, and follows up by showing how much easier things are with Wi-GO in tow.

While the project is only in prototype form at the moment, we suspect that it will only be a matter of time until you see devices like Wi-GO in your local supermarket.

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Cube Solving Robot Shatters The World Record

June 2, 2011 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

This cube-shaped bot just shattered the robotic Rubik’s Cube solving record by about 8 seconds. It did it in a blazing 10.69 seconds to best the old record of 18.2 seconds. There was immediate confusion here at Hackaday as some of us thought the record was actually around six seconds. And it is, for humans. That’s right, the human record holder completed a cube in 6.24 seconds… faster than a robot by almost four seconds. It’s surprising that we can still beat mechanized devices at some repetitive mechanical operations.

Take a look at the speed run shown in the video after the break. What strikes us is that the motions are incredibly efficient, and the bot is very quite. Compare that efficiency to CuBear, a solver that uses a different motor for each side of the cube. That one doesn’t need to grip the cube making us think it could beat this version if the firmware were quite a bit faster.

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Tree Climber Takes A Page From The Inchworm Book

May 30, 2011 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

Sharp talons and a strong torso let this robot climb trees, even while carrying a heavy payload. It uses a simple principle, two gripping units allow it to grab onto the tree. These modules alternate, one grips while the torso moves the other up the tree.

You can make out the trio of rods which connect the front and back half of the robot in the image above. Watch the video after the break to see how the motors move these rods with the dexterity of an inchworm, allowing it not only to climb upwards, but to bend and flex to match the contours encountered in the wild.

This was presented at International Conference on Robotics and Automation a few weeks ago. Unfortunately we can only find an abstract for the paper so please leave a link in the comments if you know where to find the full monty.

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Aquabot Gets Around More Than You’d Think

May 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

This doesn’t have the flashy futuristic appeal that we’d like to see from high-tech robots, but this amphibious wanderer is well suited for it’s intended purpose. It was developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota to navigate mostly wet environments, collecting data about water quality as part of a distributed army of sensor bots.

The two little arms sticking out in front of it are made of carbon fiber and attached to servo motors inside. The video below the fold shows the trapezoidal body tumbling end-over end to get around. But the awkward, baby-turtle-like locomotion isn’t the only thing in its bag of movement tricks. It can also adjust its buoyancy to float, sink, or hover somewhere in the wet stuff.

To get a better look at what went into developing this, take a look at the Adelopod developed at UMN a couple of years back. We also embedded a video of that tumbling robot because they share the build details we’re always on the lookout for.

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This Robot Can Beat You At Pointless Games

May 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

We already know that robots can be smarter than us as evidenced by Watson beating [Ken Jennings] at Jeopardy, or Deep Blue beating [Garry Kasparov] at chess. Now [E024576] is striving to build a bot to compete at physical games.

For the challenge, he’s chosen one of the games from a television game show called Minute to Win It. This challenge is called Mad Dog, and lends its name to this robot. The goal is to pick up a ruler with two tic tac containers glued to it, then shake it until all of the candies are ejected from those containers. Check out what he’s come up with in the clip after the break. The machine is driven by a PIXAXE microcontroller, with input from an IR remote control. It reaches out, grips the ruler tightly, and shakes like there’s no tomorrow. Quite impressive, even if there’s very little purpose in its operation. That makes it the perfect task for robot, right?

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