Keepon, Eat Your Heart Out

October 29, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJmyf4vg2hg]

[Ruyck] sent us this video of his mini Keepon robot. For those who haven’t been initiated, Keepon is a very emotive, and extremely expensive, dancing robot. He is deceptively simple looking, but as you can see in [Ruyck]’s version, it is fairly complex. [Ruyck] has used a mini RC collective pitch helicopter assembly for the motion, which makes controlling it fairly intuitive. At first, we were not too impressed with [Ruyck]’s final implementation, which you can see along with a comparison video of Keepon after the break. Then we realized, all he as to do is find a way to attach the bottom of the foam body to the base to achieve much more of the squash and stretch motion of keepon. A little creative programming and this little fellow could be made autonomous and synchronized to music.
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BigDog’s Bipedal Brother

October 27, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67CUudkjEG4]

Boston Dynamics is at it again. This time, they’ve created a creepy biped with a natural gait. It may look very similar to BigDog, because it really is almost the same system. Named PETMAN, this biped system is being designed to help test chemical protection suits. This bot can stress the suit by walking, running, and even crawling in a room filled with poison gas. Not only can PETMAN walk, run, and crawl, but it can also sweat and change its temperature. That’s pretty cool. Like BigDog, the most impressive part is when they give it a shove and it recovers with a motion that seems almost organic.

(the) Best Robotics Competition

October 24, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 32 Comments

okbestLogo

If you give a mouse a cookie, he will ask for a glass of milk. If you give a team of geeks a box full of parts ranging from aluminum to plywood to motors to RF interfaces, they will build a robot. Introducing Best Robotics, a volunteer group that gives schools a box of hardware and 6 weeks to build a robot that will compete against other schools for the title of champion.

This past Saturday the17th, the OKBest regional competition was held and I, HaD writer [Jakob], was lucky enough to be invited personally to not only watch – but compete. Check out our full breakdown after the jump.
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Score Online With Robot Soccer

October 22, 2009 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

robot-soccer

[Erik] and [Heni] have been using soccer as a way to improve code development techniques in robotics. Their soccer playing robots won first prize in the development competition at the 2007 RoboCup competition. They are using a teaching method they call Kinesthetic Bootstrapping to program the motions of the Bioloid robotic platform. The robots are moved by hand and those motions are recorded twenty times per second. The recorded data is then optimized in software and ready for playback in the robot.

After the break you’ll see a video of the robots playing soccer against each other. They receive commands from a computer via zig-bee with Nintendo Wii remotes as the user interface. That’s all fine and dandy, but perhaps you should try your own hand at a game. [Erik] and [Heni] developed a web interface that allows you to control the bots over the internet. We tried it out yesterday and had quite a bit of fun. We set the video stream to “Spectator” and “Jpeg Server Push” to get an image. You’ll have to wait until next week to play because the bots need someone to pick then up when they fall over. Live play is scheduled for Mondays and Wednesdays from 4-6pm GMT+2. That should give you plenty of time to program your Arduino to say “Gooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllll!!!” when you score. Continue reading “Score Online With Robot Soccer” →

Ski Bot

October 21, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luzs63dGHQs]

[Bojan Nemec] has come up with a robot that can ski better than us. Not that skiing better than us is a hugely lofty goal. The bot is capable of skiing using standard, off the shelf skis. It has a dual computing system. One system only does steering and balance while the other does all the vision and control. He’s using the carving technique of skiing, stating that normal skiing is just too hard for a robot. That sounds like a challenge to us. You can check out the blooper reel, which is still better than us, after the break.

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Industrial Robots Producing Art

October 21, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

[blip.tv ?posts_id=2728039&dest=-1]

Here is an interesting project that should spark some good discussion. Artaic is a company that is using industrial robots to produce mosaics. They are then selling these mosaics as fine art. As you can see, some of the examples are quite nice looking. However, we have to wonder what the draw is to own one that is made by a robot. Is it really that much different from just printing an image? We really do think it is a cool project and an efficient way of producing these mosaics. We would really love to see one of those super fast delta robots doing the work.

We’re trying to reduce the negativity here at Hackaday. We are passionate geeks and hackers, and as such, we tend to jump straight to the negative points. We hope you guys will follow along with us and try to be constructive in the comments. That being said, the video did seem a bit pretentious, didn’t it?

[via BotJunkie]

Awesome Robots Love Fanta

October 19, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

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

What you are seeing above is not a commercial for Fanta, though we think it would have been a good one. It also isn’t being played at an accelerated speed. That is a real time demonstration of the accuracy and speed the ABB robots achieve. We were surprised, even shocked, when we clicked play. We don’t know who came up with this idea, but we want those robots, and we want some Fanta. We’re a bit curious what industry needs beverage tracing robots though.

The last time we saw such amazing feats of robot awesomeness, they were bouncing balls and catching stuff in mid air.