Robot Seeks And Sucks Up Cigarette Butts, With Its Feet

July 20, 2024 by Donald Papp 30 Comments

It would be better if humans didn’t toss cigarette butts on the ground in the first place, but change always takes longer than we think it should. In the meantime, researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology have used the problem as an opportunity to explore what seems to be a novel approach: attaching vacuum pickups to a robot’s feet, therefore removing the need for separate effectors.

VERO (Vacuum-cleaner Equipped RObot) is a robotic dog with a vacuum cleaner “backpack” and four hoses, one going down each leg. A vision system detects a cigarette butt, then ensures the robot plants a foot next to it, sucking it up. The research paper has more details, but the video embedded below gives an excellent overview.

While VERO needs to think carefully about route planning, using the legs as effectors is very efficient. Being a legged robot, VERO can navigate all kinds of real-world environments — including stairs — which is important because cigarette butts know no bounds.

Also, using the legs as effectors means there is no need for the robot to stop and wait while a separate device (like an arm with a vacuum pickup) picks up the trash. By simply planting a foot next to a detected cigarette butt, VERO combines locomotion with pickup.

It’s fascinating to see how the Mini Cheetah design has really become mainstream to the point that these robots are available off-the-shelf, and it’s even cooler to see them put to use. After all, robots tackling trash is a good way to leverage machines that can focus on specific jobs, even if they aren’t super fast at it.

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Flexures Make Robotic Fingers Simpler To Print

July 16, 2024 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Designing an anthropomorphic robotic hand seems to make a lot of sense — right up until the point that you realize just how complex the human hand is. What works well in bone and sinew often doesn’t translate well to servos and sensors, and even building a single mechanical finger can require dozens of parts.

Or, if you’re as clever about things as [Adrian Perez] is, only one part. His print-in-place robotic finger, adorably dubbed “Fingie,” is a huge step toward simplifying anthropomorphic manipulators. Fingie is printed in PLA and uses flexures for the three main joints of the finger, each of which consists of two separate and opposed coil springs. The flexures allow the phalanges to bend relative to each other in response to the motion of three separate tendons that extend through a channel on the palmar aspect of the finger, very much like the real thing.

The flexures eliminate the need for bearings at each joint and greatly decrease the complexity of the finger, but the model isn’t perfect. As [Adrian] points out, the off-center attachment for the tendons makes the finger tend to curl when the joints are in flexion, which isn’t how real fingers work. That should be a pretty easy fix, though. And while we appreciate the “one and done” nature of this print, we’d almost like to see the strap-like print-in-place tendons replaced with pieces of PLA filament added as a post-processing step, to make the finger more compact and perhaps easier to control.

Despite the shortcomings, and keeping in mind that this is clearly a proof of concept, we really like where [Adrian] is going with this, and we’re looking forward to seeing a hand with five Fingies, or four Fingies and a Thumbie. It stands to be vastly simpler than something like [Will Cogley]’s biomimetic hand, which while an absolute masterpiece of design, is pretty daunting for most of us to reproduce.

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Useless Robot Gets Cute, Has Personality

July 4, 2024 by Donald Papp 4 Comments

Useless robots (or useless machines) are devices that, when switched on, exist only to turn themselves back off. They are fun and fairly simple builds that are easy to personify, and really invite customization by their creators. Even so, [tobychui]’s Kawaii Useless Robot goes above and beyond in that regard. Not only will his creation dutifully turn itself off, but if the user persists in engaging it, Kawaii Useless Robot grows progressively (and adorably) upset which ultimately culminates in scooting about and trying to run away.

If anything, it gets *cuter* when upset.

This is actually a ground-up re-imagining of an original work [tobychui] saw from a Japanese maker twelve years ago. That original Kawaii Useless Robot did not have any design details, so [tobychui] decided to re-create his own.

Behind the laser-cut front panel is a dot matrix LED display made up of eight smaller units, and inside are a total of four motors, an ESP32 development board, and supporting electronics. A neat touch is the ability to allow connections over Wi-Fi for debugging or remote control. The project page has some nice photos of the interior that are worth checking out. It’s a very compact and efficient build!

Watch it in action in the video (embedded below) which also includes a tour of the internals and a thorough description of the functions.

Inspired to make your own useless machine? Don’t be afraid to re-invent the whole concept. For example, we loved the one that physically spins the switch and the clock that falls to the floor when it detects someone looking at it. That last one is a close relative of the clock that displays the wrong time if and only if someone is looking.

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Make A Cheap Robot Mower Much Smarter

July 2, 2024 by Jenny List 15 Comments

The Parkside range of tools as sold in European Lidl stores may be reasonably priced, but it contains some products of far better quality than their modest cost would suggest. This means that Parkside hacking has become as much of a cottage industry as IKEA hacking, and they’re a firm favorite for modifications. [Lambertus] has taken a Parkside robot mower, and converted it from a relatively mundane device to a fully-connected smart robot, with the aid of an ESP8266.

The hardware is surprisingly simple, as all that’s really needed is a stop/go command. This can be readily found by hooking up to the input from the mower’s rain sensor, allowing the ESP to control its operation. Then there’s an accelerometer to allow it to count motion, and a hookup tot he battery to measure voltage. The firmware uses ESPHome, resulting in a mower now connected to home automation.

This isn’t the first time we’ve shown you someone upgrading the smarts on robot mover, and of course we’ve also taken a tour through the history of lawn mowers in general.

Solving Cold Cases With Hacked Together Gear

June 28, 2024 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

People go missing without a trace far more commonly than any of us would like to think about. Of course the authorities will conduct a search, but even assuming they have the equipment and personnel necessary, the odds are often stacked against them. A few weeks go by, then months, and eventually there’s yet another “cold case” on the books and a family is left desperate for closure.

But occasionally a small team or an individual, if determined enough, can solve such a case even when the authorities have failed. Some of these people, such as [Antti Suanto] and his brother, have even managed to close the books on multiple missing person cases. In an incredibly engrossing series of blog posts, [Antti] describes how he hacked together a pair of remotely operated vehicles to help search for and ultimately identify sunken cars.

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Programming Robots Is Hard, Figuring Out How To Make It Easier Is Harder

June 18, 2024 by Donald Papp 12 Comments

[Benjie Holson] is an experienced roboticist and wrote an interesting article published on IEEE Spectrum about how the idea most people have of non-roboticists is a myth, and efforts to target this group with simplified robotic frameworks tend to be doomed.

Now, let’s make a couple things absolutely clear right up front: He is not saying robots shouldn’t be easier to program, nor is he saying that non-roboticists literally do not exist (of course they do.) The issues he’s highlighting really come down to product design.

[Benjie] points out that programming robots is super hard, but it’s also hard in more than one way and for more than one reason. And when people try to create a product to make it easier, they tend to commit two big product design no-no’s: they focus on the wrong hard parts, and they design their product for a vaguely-defined audience that doesn’t really exist. That group is the mythical non-roboticist.

These are actually very solid points to make in terms of product design in general. Designing a product that solves the wrong problems for a poorly-defined group isn’t exactly a recipe for success. [Benjie]’s advice on making a truly effective and useful API framework that genuinely lowers the bar of complexity in a useful way is similarly applicable to product design in general.

His first piece of advice is not to design for poorly-defined amorphous groups. Your product should serve actual needs of actual users. If you cannot name three people you have actually spoken to who would be helped by your product, you are designing for an amorphous (and possibly imaginary) group.

The second is to design as though your users are just as smart as you are, just less tolerant of problems stemming from rough edges like compatibility and configuration issues. Remove those so that your users can get useful work done without having to re-invent the wheel, or resort to workarounds.

Robotic frameworks like ROS are useful and extensible, but whenever someone attempts to focus on creating a simplified framework, [Benjie] says they tend to step on the same rakes. It’s a mistake [Benjie] has committed himself, and see repeated by others. We think his advice is good product design advice in general, whether for designing APIs or something else.

Screwless Eyeballs Are A Lesson In Design-For-Assembly

June 8, 2024 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

[Will Cogley] makes eyeballs; hey, everyone needs a hobby, and we don’t judge. Like all his animatronics, his eyeballs are wondrous mechanisms, but they do tend toward being a bit complex, especially in terms of the fasteners needed to assemble them.

But not anymore. [Will] redid his eyeball design to be as easy to assemble as possible, and the results are both impressive and instructive. His original design mimics real eyeballs quite well, but takes six servos and a large handful of screws and nuts, which serve both to attach the servos to the frame and act as pivots for the many, many linkages needed. The new design has snap-fit pivots similar to Lego Technic axles printed right into the linkage elements, as well as snap connectors to hold the servos down. This eliminates the need for 45 screws and cuts assembly time from 30 minutes to about six, with no tools required. And although [Will] doesn’t mention it, it must save a bunch of weight, too.

Everything comes at a cost, of course, and such huge gains in assembly ease are no exception. [Will] details this in the video below, including printing the parts in the right orientation to handle the forces exerted both during assembly and in use. And while it’s hard to beat a five-fold reduction in assembly time, he might be able to reduce that even more with a few print-in-place pivots.

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