The judges’ ballots are in and we’re proud to present the ten winners of the fourth round of the 2021 Hackaday Prize. We love robots, and it’s obvious that you do too! The number and range of projects submitted this year were overwhelming.
No robotics round is complete without a robot arm, and while a few of them were in the finals, we especially liked CM6, which really pulled out all the stops. This is research-grade robotics on a not-quite-student budget, featuring custom compliant mechanisms so that it can play well with its fleshy companions.
With six degrees of freedom, and six motors, the drivetrain budget can quickly get out of hand on builds like these, so we’re especially happy to see custom, open, brushless-motor driver boards used to reduce the cost of admission. Even if you’re not going to make a 100% faithful CM6 clone, you’ll learn a lot just from going through the build. Oh, and did we mention it has a software stack? Continue reading “Meet The Winners Of The Hackaday Prize Round Four: Redefine Robots”→
Exoskeletons, power suits, and iron suits in science fiction have served as the inspiration for many engineers and engineering projects over the years. This is certainly the case at [Hacksmith Industries], where Hackaday alum [James Hobson] has been building a massive mechanical exoskeleton since January 2019, inspired by the P-5000 Power Loader from the Alien movies. (Video, embedded below.)
Unlike the movie version, the [Hacksmith] power loader is not bipedal but built on top of the chassis of a small tracked skid-steer loader. Its existing hydraulic power unit also feeds all the upper body hydraulic cylinders. The upper body maintains the basic look of the movie version and was built from plasma-cut steel sections that fit together with a tab and slot system before being welded. Each arm has five degrees of freedom, controlled by proportional hydraulic valves. The power loader is controlled by an industrial grade control system based on the Raspberry Pi, running ROS.
Every single actuator is capable of applying enough force to kill, so safety is an important consideration in the design. It has emergency stop buttons mounted in several locations, including on a wireless remote. The ROS controller monitors the position of every cylinder using string potentiometers for closed-loop control, and to trigger the emergency stop if an actuator goes out of bounds. The power loader can be controlled by the onboard pilot using a pair of simulator flight controller joysticks, or remotely using a PS4 controller.
[Hacksmith Industries] is clear about the fact that they are building multi-ton power loaded for fun and entertainment, not because it’s necessarily practical or a commercially viable product. However, other exoskeletons have proven that they are a viable solution for reducing fatigue and risk of injury for industrial workers, and carrying heavy loads in rough terrain.
When you are responsible for maintaining devices at a client’s location, software tools like remote desktop and SSH are great, but sometimes they are not enough. For some problems, you need to get eyes and hands on the device to figure out what’s going on and fix the problem. This is a challenge [Will Donaldson] from EDM Studio is all too familiar with. They develop and maintain interactive museum exhibits all over the world, so they created Omni, a modular telepresence robot for inspection, maintenance, and a variety of other tasks.
The Omni uses a set of three omni-wheels under its base, powered by DC geared motors with encoders, each controlled by a separate motor driver and Arduino Nano. A similar arrangement was used by Mark Rober for his domino art robot. The main controller is a Raspberry Pi 4 running ROS2 (Robot Operating System), which takes inputs from a 360 LIDAR sensor, high-quality camera module, and IMU.
All the components are mounted on a series of plates separated using threaded rods. This arrangement allows for maximum flexibility and space, especially the open-top plate, which has a grid of holes machined in to allow almost anything to be mounted. In this case, a robotic arm is mounted for manipulating the environment. Another neat feature is the charging station connector, consisting of two parallel metal strips on the outside of the robot.
Omni’s mission is very similar to that of Spot, the robotic dog from Boston Dynamics intended, among other things, for Industrial Inspection. What practical purposes would you use Omni for? Let us know in the comments below.
Legged robots span all sorts of shapes and sizes. From the paradigm-setting quadrupeds built from a pit-crew of grad students to the Kickstarter canines that are sure to entertain your junior hackers, the entry point is far and wide. Not one to simply watch from the sidelines, though, [Oracid] wanted to get in on the quadruped-building fun and take us all with him. The result is 5BQE2, a spry budget quadruped that can pronk around the patio at a proper 1 meter-per-second clip.
Without a tether, weight becomes a premium for getting such a creature to move around at a respectable rate. Part of what makes that possible is [Oracid’s] lightweight legs. Designing the legs around a five-bar linkage tucks the otherwise-heavy actuators out of the leg and into the body, resulting in a limb that’s capable of faster movement. What’s more, 5BQE2 is made from the LEGO plastic building bricks of our heydays. And with a full bill-of-materials, we’re just about ready to head over to our parents’ garage and dust off those parts for a second life.
For some action shots of 5BQE2, have a look at the video after the break. And since no set would be complete without the building instructions, stay tuned through the full video to walk through the assembly process step-by-step.
Here at Hackaday, we’re certainly no stranger to walking automatons, but not all robots use their legs for walking. For a trip down memory lane, have a look at [Carl Bugeja’s] buzzing Vibro-bots and UC Berkeley’s leaping Salto.
If you watch it on TV or see clips on YouTube, you’ll notice that most combat robots have wheels, which would make sense. They are simple, work well, and if designed right they can take a bit of a beating. So why did [Luke] design his 12-pound bot with no wheels, or any locomotion system for that matter? You can find out more about this peculiar bot in his build report with more than 130 images.
[Luke’s] bot, called Kitten Mittens, is a gyro walker combat robot. This means that instead of traditional tank treads or wheels to move about, [Luke] navigates by angling his bot’s weapon and using the angular momentum to lift up one side of the bot to “walk” forward. Watch the video after the break to see it in action. While this does leave Kitten Mittens much slower and less agile than competitors, it gives one massive leg up; weight. Kitten Mittens fights in the 12-pound combat robotics weight class, but most leagues have weight bonuses for bots that have no wheels or use otherwise nontraditional locomotion. Where [Luke] competes, the Norwalk Havoc Robot League, this means that his bot can be up to 6 pounds heavier than the other competitors!
A printed prototype of the weapon, showing off the integrated hub motor.
So how did [Luke] take advantage of that extra 6 pounds? The biggest thing was the weapon. It is made of 3/4-inch S7 tool steel and has a custom hub motor integrated into the center, bringing its rotating weight to 5.5 pounds. In addition to thickness, the added weight allowance permitted a larger spinning diameter so that Kitten Mittens could hit opponents before they hit him.
[Luke] is not new to the world of combat robotics, and knew it would take more than just a big weapon to win. Part of the extra weight budget was also used to beef up his armor and internal structure of the bot, so that hits from opponents would just bounce him around the cage harmlessly. This even included custom bent titanium guards surrounding the weapon, to help in self-righting.
When it first debuted in February of 2021, Kitten Mittens was a smashing success! It went 4-0 in the 12lb weight class at NHRL, winning the $1,000 prize and earning its spots in the annual finals, where [Luke] will compete against other finalists from the rest of the season for a chance to win the $12,000 first-place prize.
Bots that walk, shuffle, or crawl are becoming more of a trend lately in all weight classes. Even Overhaul, a 250-pound bot, has been given a new set of feet to shuffle around on. You can read more about this interesting concept here.
Hermit crabs are famous for being small critters that, from time to time throughout their lives, abandon one shell carried on their back to pick up a new one. Project HERMITS by [Ken Nakagaki] is inspired by this very concept, and involves table-top robots that dock with a variety of modules with different mechanical mechanisms.
As shown in the project video, the small robots augment themselves by interfacing with attachments referred to as “mechanical shells.” They variously allow the robot to move differently or interact in a new way with the world.
One shell allows the robot to activate a small fan, while another lets it rotate arrows in various directions. others let robots work together to actuate a bigger mechanical assembly like a gripper or a haptic feedback joystick.
A particularly cute example is the “lift shell” which allows one little robot give another one a boost in height. Another series of shells allows the robots to play the role of various characters in a performance of Alice in Wonderland.
The technology is all built around Sony’s tiny two-wheeled toio robots, but adds a vertical actuator to the platform that lets the robots actively dock with a variety of shell designs. It’s an involved hack, but key to the whole enterprise. The individual bots are all controlled by Raspberry Pis communicating over Bluetooth.
The Open Dynamic Robot Initiative Group is a collaboration between five robotics-oriented research groups, based in three countries, with the aim to build an Open Source robotics platform based around the torque-control method. Leveraging 3D printing, a few custom PCBs, and off-the-shelf parts, there is a low-barrier to entry and much lower cost compared to similar robots.
The eagle-eyed will note that this is only a development platform, and all of the higher level control is off-machine, hosted by a separate PC. What’s interesting here, is just how low-level the robot actually is. The motion hardware is purely a few BLDC motors driven by field-orientated control (FOC) driver units, a wireless controller and some batteries. The FOC method enables very efficient motor commutation, giving excellent efficiency and maximum torque. A delve into the maths of how this method operates will be an eye opener for the uninitiated. Optical encoders attached to the motors give positional feedback for the control loop.
It is this control loop that’s kinda weird, in that operates over Wi-Fi! Normally one would do all the position, torque and speed sensing locally within the leg unit, with local control loops, as well as running all the limb kinematics and motion planning. This would need some considerable local processing grunt, which can make development more difficult.
This project side-steps this, by first leveraging the ESPNOW protocol, initially aimed at the ESP8266 and friends. By patching Ubuntu Linux, and enabling preemptive multitasking for real-time scheduling, as well as carefully selecting Wi-Fi drivers, it was possible to get raw packets out to robot in about 1 ms, enabling control loop bandwidths of around 1 Khz. And, that, was fast enough to run at least sixteen motors in parallel.
