[Amnon] sent in this demo of his groups voice controlled wheel chair. I couldn’t find any details, but sometimes just a demo is enough to find some new inspiration. They connected a hm2007 speech recognition kit to an Innovation FIRST controller board on an electric wheel chair chasis. Additional sensors detect stairs and other obstacles.
Robots Hacks2457 Articles
Swarm Robotics
Uber-geek [James McLurkin] was in Austin recently demoing his robot swarm. He’s on tour with EDA Tech Forum. [McLurkin] has multiple degrees from the MIT AI lab and worked at iRobot for a couple of years. Lately, he has been working on distributed robot computing: robot swarms.
[McLurkin] was an entertaining speaker and had an interesting view of robotics. He is optimistic that robot parts will become more modular, so it will be easier to build them, and more importantly, faster to design them.
Some quotes:
- “There’s more sensors in a cockroach’s butt than any robot”
- “12 engineer years to design, 45 minutes to build”
- “If it can break your ankle, it’s a real [rc] car.”
Teach Your Robots To Cook
The nitty gritty details are a little bit hidden, but [Sylvain]’s work is awesome enough that I just don’t care. He’s been doing research on robot learning with some tasty results. After all, who doesn’t want a robot to make breakfast for em? He’s taken the time to publish some source code, so robot made breakfast isn’t that far out of reach. mmmm.
Maker Faire 2008: SWARM
SWARM is a large scale kinetic art project. The electrically powered spheres move by shifting the batteries around the center axle. By tilting the central ring, th orb can steer as well. The SWARM members are currently radio controlled, but the plan is for them to eventually receive commands from a mother node. More information about the orbs’ design is available on the project wiki. A video of the wobbly buggers in motion is embedded after the break.
Li-ion For Your Roomba
[gim] gutted some li-ion laptop batteries to replace his roomba’s battery pack. He had to pick up a li-ion charger and add a protection circuit to deal with the li-ion cells, but ended up with a new lighter pack for his roomba. If you head this way, the protection circuit is a vital component to prevent fires/explisions/etc. Looks like a great resource for robot power or even R/C projects.
Playstation Controller Interfacing
This is an older set of hacks, but I’m surprised we haven’t covered them before. The playstation controller is an interesting alternative to normal robotic controls. This PS1 controller to serial interface is based on a Motorola HC68 series micro-controller. This even simpler version only needs some diodes to interface with a parallel port. Probably more interesting is this how-to on using a wireless PS2 controller with a basic stamp II.
Bad-ass Modular Snake Robot
[Andrew] sent in this sweet snake robot video. The snake bots are all about 36 inches long and built from lots of hitech servos and 6061 aluminum. The guys/gals at Carnegie Mellon have built quite a few of these, and I’d say that their work is paying off. They haven’t published much in the way of details, but it appears that the snakes are being computer controlled for faster behavioral development than an on-board mictrocontroller would allow. When I saw the snake motion I was reminded of the winner of the latest Tresser robotics contest – Phoenix. It’s a spider like bot based on servos, but with some very impressive motion programming that was designed with an excel spreadsheet.
