Robotic Bird Flaps Away Last Bits Of Privacy

March 30, 2011 by Mike Szczys 45 Comments

This really gives a lifelike look to the eye in the sky. In case you were worried that every part of your life wasn’t being recorded by a surveillance camera, the Festo Bionic Learning Network has come up with a drone that will be hard to discern from the wildlife.

Watch the video after the break. We’re not 100% certain that it’s not fake, but it looks real enough (the mark of a truly amazing design). You’ll see the robo-bird flapping away both from a fixed point on the ground, and from a camera view behind the head of the device. It propels itself both by flapping and rotating the wings and is capable of taking off, flying, and landing autonomously.

It’s bigger than the hummingbird drone that was developed for DARPA, but we think that it sticks out less when caught at a glance. No word on the intended use for the device, but we’re sure that some of you are enjoying the nostalgia of the mechanical owl from Clash of the Titans, and that’s why we want one.

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Quadcopter Pair Plays Table Tennis Without The Table

March 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

This pair of quad-rotor helicopters does a better job of keeping a ping-pong ball in the air than we could. The two flying drones are performing inside of the flying machine arena, a 1000 cubic meter indoor space surrounded by nets with a foam-padded floor. This makes for a prototype-friendly space, protecting the copters from hard landings and the experimenters from the maiming that might accompany a runaway robot.

This project is headed by researcher [Raffaello D’Andrea]. Previously, we’ve seen his work on a distributed flight array. This time around he’s not working with configurable modules, but completely separate units. Don’t miss the video after the break to see several iterations used to keep a ball in the air. Each bot has the head of a tennis racket mounted at its center. Throw a ball at them and they’ll to what they can to prevent it touching the ground.

While we’re on the topic, we caught a story on NPR about hobby drones. Sounds like their growing popularity has caught the attention of the non-hacker community and restrictions might be on the way. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and make your own flyer while it’s still the wild-west of personal drones.

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Printable Gripping Rover Is Wristwatch Controlled

March 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

[Lars Kristian Roland] is using a wristwatch to control this rover. The bot itself is a utilitarian build with a gripper based on this Thingiverse project. As you can see in the video after the break, it’s got variable speed control based on accelerometer data from a TI ez430 Chronos wristwatch.

The watch connects to the bot wirelessly thanks to a CC1110 development board which relays communications to the on-board Arduino through a serial connection. It looks like it’s a bit of a bother to make slow and precise movements using this setup, but this can probably be changed by tweaking how accelerometer values are interpreted (using a non-linear equation would allow you more control at low speeds without sacrificing top speed for the motors).

Because this is using the same RF hardware that the IM-ME does, we can’t help but wonder if the CC1110 development board could be swapped out for an unused IM-ME dongle?

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Your Robot Stand-in Has Arrived

March 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Meet TIPI, the Telepresence Interface by Pendulum Inversion. TIPI is something of a surrogate, giving physical presence to telecommuters by balancing an LCD screen and camera atop its six foot frame. The user has full control of the robot’s movement, with their own camera image shown on the display so that others interacting with the bot will with whom they are conversing.

A pair of 12.5″ wheels connec to DC motors via a gear box with a 37:1 ratio. These specs are necessary to recover from a sudden 20 degree loss of equilibrium, quite impressive for a bot of this stature. An Orangutan SVP board monitors a two-axis accelerometer and a gyroscope for accurate positioning data. This board automatically keeps balance, while taking user commands from a second control, a Beagle Board. The Beagle Board handles the communications, including sending and receiving the video signals, and delivering incoming position control data to the Orangutan. Separating the two systems guards against a screen-shattering fall by making sure the hardware likely to face slow-down or lockup is physically separate from that responsible for balance.

Check out the video clip after the brake to see some balancing goodness. It shouldn’t be hard to build your own version for much less than the $15k price tag enjoyed by some commercial versions.

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Nano Sumo Robot Takes On All Comers

March 28, 2011 by Mike Nathan 10 Comments

nano_sumo_bot

While most Sumo-style robots are fairly sizable, there is a subsection of the Sumo robot movement that focuses on making small robots. Really small robots.

[Patrick] wrote in to share his latest creation, a Nano Sumo robot measuring a scant 1 in. x 1 in. The Nano Sumo is operated by an ATMega 328 micro controller housed on a custom-built PCB. The board was designed to interface directly with the 1A Dual Motor Driver from SparkFun, which provides all of the PWM signaling to the motors for speed control and braking. A small 50mAh Li-poly battery is attached to the robot, which can be charged using 4 AA batteries via a custom charging circuit. The mechanical components of the bot were handled by his friend [Gary], which you can read about here.

As you can see in the video below, the bot does its job pretty well. It does seem like the object detection gets confused every once in awhile, but that can likely be remedied with a few software tweaks.

Check out his page for additional build videos, including the PCB construction and programming processes.

If you’re interested in learning more about Sumo bots, check out this slightly larger robot we covered a short while back.

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Wireless Animatronic Hand Control

March 28, 2011 by Mike Nathan 9 Comments

animatronic_hand

[Easton] was looking to enter his local science fair and needed a project that would wow the judges. After considering it for a bit, he decided that an animatronic hand would be a sure winner. Many animatronic projects we have seen are connected to a computer for control purposes, but his is a bit different.

[Easton] wanted to be able to control the hand in real time with his own movements, so he sewed some flex sensors onto a glove and wired them up to a custom Arduino shield he built. The Arduino is also connected to an XBee radio, allowing it to interface with his animatronic hand wirelessly.

He built the hand after studying anatomical drawings to better understand where finger joints were located and how they moved. He cut up pieces of flexible wire tubing to build the fingers, reinforcing them with Lego bricks. He ran fishing wire from the finger tips to five independent servos to provide the hand’s motion. Another Arduino with an XBee shield was used to control the hand and receive wireless signals from the glove.

Check out the video below to see why this project won [Easton] first place in the science fair.

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Kinect Two-fer: MoCap Movie And Robot Control

March 26, 2011 by Mike Nathan 6 Comments

kinect_twofer

It’s no mystery that we like the Kinect around here, which is why we’re bringing you a Kinect two-fer today.

We have seen video hacks using the Kinect before, and this one ranks up there on the coolness scale. In [Torben’s] short film about an animation student nearly missing his assignment deadline, the Kinect was used to script the animation of a stick figure model. The animation was captured and built in Maya, then overlaid on a separate video clip to complete the movie. The overall quality is great, though you can notice some of the typical “jitter” that the Kinect is known for, and there are a few places where the model sinks into the floor a bit.

If you want to try your hand at animation using the Kinect, all of the scripts used to make the movie are available on the creator’s site for free. [via Kinect-Hacks]

Our second Kinect item comes in the form of a gesture driven Lego MindStorms bot. Using OpenNI along with Primesense for body tracking, [rasomuro] was able to use simple motions to drive his NXT bot around the house. His movements are tracked by the Kinect sensor which are translated into commands relayed to the robot via his laptop’s Bluetooth connection. Since the robot has two motors, he mapped couple of simple arm motions to drive the bot around. We’ll be honest when we say that the motions remind us of Will Farrell’s “Frank the Tank” scene in Old School, but [rasomuro] says that he is trying to simulate the use of levers to drive the bot. Either way, it’s pretty cool.

Videos of both hacks are embedded below for your perusal.

If you are interested in seeing some more cool Kinect hacks be sure to check out this Minecraft interface trio, this cool Kinect realtime video overlay, and this Kinect-Nerf gun video game interface.

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