Building The Yellow Submarine

February 23, 2010 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Submarine builds are always fun but frequently produce headaches when it comes to keeping the water out. [Jason Rollette] built this ROV to explore a shipwreck in Lake Michigan. The main structure is PVC and various bilge pumps are used for propulsion. An AVR ATmega32 controls the on board electronics with an Ethernet tether to the surface. He’s even got a visual basic program that displays system information and a video feed. It may not be as stylish as the last submarine we saw but it’s amazingly well thought out and well built.

[Thanks Daphreak]

Robocup Bot Places Wheels Perpendicularly

February 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Eric] built this robot for the 2009 Robocup Jr. competition. The game ball has IR LEDs inside of it and this little bot uses eight IR detectors for tracking. Four motors mounted perpendicular to each other provide locomotion. Since this would normally have you traveling in circles, he used some omnidirectional wheels walled Transwheels. As you can see, they have small rollers built-in and allow movement in any direction if the motors work together. A couple of L298 controller chips handle the motors. [Eric] wrote a program to calculate the PWM necessary to drive the controllers and to coordinate movement of the wheels.

Don’t miss the demo videos after the break and, if you’re not a fan of wheels, stop by and see the bi-pedal soccer robots. Continue reading “Robocup Bot Places Wheels Perpendicularly” →

Drink Making Unit

February 17, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 35 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC9l1jO7Lyc]

3 breast pumps, a Meggy jr RGB (slightly modified) and copious amounts of alcohol. This sounds like a typical weekend at HAD headquarters, but it is in fact the parts list for the Drink Making Unit by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. Created for the upcoming Barbot 2010 event, this unit is a cocktail mixer. Load 3 liquids in, program the Meggy and you can push a button to dispense. We are pleased to see how much they modified off the shelf components to make this happen. Yes, there could be major improvements like mixing, more liquid reservoirs, and a better cooling system, but we think this thing is pretty slick.

Hexacopter

February 15, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 70 Comments

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/6194911]
Quad copters have been pretty popular for the last few years, but this one is new to us. Take the same basic layout, but bump it to 6 rotors. Then you’ll have the hexacopter (google translated). With 6 rotors, built in GPS and stabilization and a camera mounted on the bottom, this thing is pretty well equipped. You can see how agile and stable it is in the video above. We know it isn’t necessarily new, but it is new to us. Of course, you don’t have to stop at 6 rotors. You could always just continue on to 8.

Dexterous Hexapod Clarification

February 11, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3ovrT8pWww]

This tip was submitted by [Mike], with the original information seen in this post. When I passed the story along to our writer [Mike Szczys] I didn’t send along the entire email conversation. This bot is noteworthy because it has taught itself to walk. In the build log you can learn about how it has created its gait and altered it based off of the vision. There are also some great pictures of prototypes there too. While we can all agree that it isn’t as impressive looking initially as the A-Pod, remember that it wasn’t programmed to look impressive.

Veteran Robot Features Eight Legs And BeagleBoard

February 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

This spider-bot was built by [Zhanx] during his deployment in Iraq. He didn’t have prior hardware building experience and started out on this project when he received an Arduino to play with in September. Must be a fast learner! The parts are laser-cut from ABS plastic and connected to 24 servos. He sourced an SSC-32 serial servo control board to take care of the motor connections.

[Zhanx] has since migrated from the Arduino to a BeagleBoard which you can see perched atop the body in the video after the break. This should give him plenty of speed and power to improve the movement routines. There’s some nice work here but adding rubber feet, like on yesterday’s hexapod, wouldn’t hurt.

Continue reading “Veteran Robot Features Eight Legs And BeagleBoard” →

Dexterous Hexapod Rocks An Atom Processor

February 10, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3ovrT8pWww]

[Matt Bunting’s] hexapod caught Intel’s eye (and their wallet). This coordinated little bot runs Ubuntu on an Atom Z530 processor, popular in netbooks like the Dell Mini 10, and uses a webcam to coordinate and monitor its motion. Intel picked up two of them from [Matt] to exhibit at trade shows. As you can see, the 18 servos provide some gorgeous motion to the beast. It’s no DJ Roomba but it approaches the zen-like perfection that is the A-Pod.

[Thanks Miked]