Ostrich Robot Machine-Learns Itself To 5K

August 1, 2021 by Jenny List 43 Comments

Ever since humanity has grasped the idea of a robot, we’ve wanted to imagine them into walking humanoid form. But making a robot walk like a human is not an easy task, and even the best of them end up with the somewhat shuffling gait of a Honda Asimo rather than the graceful poise of a balerina. Only in recent years have walking robots appeared to come of age, and then not by mimicking the human gait but something more akin to a bird.

We’ve seen it in the Boston Dynamics models, and also now in a self-balancing two-legged robot developed at Oregon State University that has demonstrated its abilities by completing an unaided 5 km run having used its machine learning skills to teach itself to run from scratch. It’s believed to be the first time a robot has achieved such a feat without first being programmed for the specific task.

The university’s PR piece envisages a time in which walking robots of this type have become commonplace, and when humans interact with them on a daily basis. We can certainly see that they could perform a huge number of autonomous outdoor tasks that perhaps a wheeled robot might find to be difficult, so maybe they have a bright future. Decide for yourself, after watching the video below the break.

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Create Large Scale Domino Art With A Robot

July 29, 2021 by Danie Conradie 14 Comments

Creating large domino art displays is a long and nerve-racking process, where bumping a single domino can mean starting from scratch. To automate the process of creating these displays, a team consisting of [Mark Rober], [John Luke], [Josh], and [Alex Baucom] built the Dominator, a robot capable of laying 100 000 dominos just over 24 hours. Video after the break.

[Mark Rober] had been toying with the idea for a few years, and the project finally for off the ground after [Mark] mentioned it in a talk he gave at the 2019 Bay Area Maker Faire. To pull it off, the team created an entire domino laying system, including an automated loading station, a precision indoor positioning system, and the robot itself. The robot is built around a frame of aluminum extrusions, riding on three omnidirectional wheels driven by precision servo motors. A large tray mounted to the front of the robot can hold and release 300 dominos at a time. The primary controller is a Raspberry Pi 4, which receives positioning information from a Marvelmind indoor positioning system and a downward-facing IR camera that looks for reflective markers on the floor. The loading system uses a conveyor system to feed the different colored dominos to an industrial Kuka robot that drops them down a grid of tubes that can hold multiple layers at once.

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Little Quadruped Uses Many Servos

July 26, 2021 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

Walking robots were once the purview of major corporations spending huge dollars on research programs. Now, they’re something you can experiment with at home. [Technovation] has been doing just that with his micro quadruped build.

The build runs twelve servos – three per leg – to enable for a great range of movement for each limb. The servos are all controlled by an Arduino Uno fitted with an Arduino Sensor Shield. Everything is fitted together with a 3D printed chassis and limb segments that bolt directly on to the servo output shafts. This is a common way of building quick, easy, lightweight assemblies with servos, and it works great here. Inverse kinematics is used to calculate the required motions of each joint, and the robot can take steps from 1 to 4cm long in a variety of gaits.

We’d love to see a few sensors and a battery pack added on to allow the ‘bot to explore further in an untethered fashion. [Technovation] has left some provision to mount extra hardware, so we look forward to seeing what comes next.

We’ve seen bigger quadrupeds do great things, too. Video after the break.

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Why Make Coffee When You’re Tired? Let A Robot Do It For You

July 25, 2021 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Like us, [Alberto] doesn’t compromise when it comes to a good cup of coffee. We figure that if he went to an office in the Before Times, he was the type of coworker to bring in their own coffee equipment so as not to suffer the office brew. Or perhaps he volunteered to order the office supplies and therefore got to decide for everyone else. Yep, that’s definitely one way to do it.

But like many of us, he is now operating out of a home office. Even so, he’s got better things to do than stand around pouring the perfect cup of coffee every morning. See, that’s where we differ, [Alberto]. But we do love Cafeino, your automated pour-over machine. It’s so sleek and lovely, and we’re sure it does a much better job than we do by hand — although we enjoy doing the pouring ourselves.

Cafeino is designed to mimic the movements of a trained barista’s hand, because evidently you’re supposed to pour the water in slow, deliberate swirls to evenly cover the grounds. (Our kettle has a chunky spout, so we just sort of wing it.) Cafeino does this by pumping water from an electric kettle and pouring a thin stream of it in circles with the help of two servos.

The three buttons each represent a different recipe setting, which specifies the amount of water, the hand pouring pattern, and the resting times between blooming the grounds and actually pouring the bulk of the water. These recipes are set using the accompanying web app via an ESP32, although the main brain barista is an Arduino Nano. Grab a cup and check out the demo after the break.

Got an old but modern coffee robot lying around? You could turn it into a planter with automated watering.

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Giving Control Of A Smartphone Robot To A Raspberry Pi

July 21, 2021 by Danie Conradie 3 Comments

Most gadgets that interface with smartphones have a rather short lifespan and inevitably end up as E-waste. Unless hackers give them a second life, as is the case with the Romo, a little smartphone-controlled robot. [David Goeken] has successfully reverse-engineered the communication protocol to allow the Romo to controlled Raspberry Pi (or microcontroller)

The Romo was a little iPhone-controlled robot brought to market with a Kickstarter campaign back in 2013. It originally used the audio jack from the iPhone for the control interface, but was quickly followed by an updated version that used iPhone 4’s 30 pin connector and later the Lightning port. Romotive, the company behind Romo, eventually went out of business, but fortunately, they open-sourced the IOS app and the firmware. This has led to a few third-party apps currently on the app store.

[David] wanted to use other hardware for control, so he set about reverse-engineering the protocol using the open-source software and a logic analyzer. Unsurprisingly, it uses a serial interface to send and receive commands, with two additional pins to detect the connection and wake up the Romo. After breaking out the interface header on the board, he was able to modify the Romo to mount a Raspberry Pi Zero, and power it using the internal battery.

[David] has not made his code public yet, but it sounds like he plans to. It looks like Romo’s can be a fun little experimentation platform, and they can be found for cheap on eBay. We covered another cool Romo hack back in 2014, which used a projector and vision system to create a Mariokart-like game. For a completely open-source smartphone robot, check out the OpenBot.

Amazon Drones Don’t Go Far

July 15, 2021 by Al Williams 41 Comments

If you are like us, you’ve wondered what all the hoopla about drones making home deliveries is about. Our battery-operated vehicles carry very little payload and still don’t have a very long range. Add sophisticated smarts and a couple of delivery packages and you are going to need a lot more battery. Or maybe not. Amazon’s recent patent filing shows a different way to do it.

In the proposed scheme, a delivery truck drives to a neighborhood and then deploys a bunch of wheeled or walking drones to deliver in the immediate area. Not only does that reduce the range requirement, but there are other advantages, as well.

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A Capable Nerf Launcher Robot

July 12, 2021 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Nerf blasters are fun to play with, and it’s now possible to even get robotic Nerf launchers you can use to chase around your friends. [Engineering After Hours] wasn’t satisfied with the official hardware, though, so built his own remote control Nerf rig to battle it out in the back yard.

The rig is built around an earlier build from [Engineering After Hours], a skid-steer RC chassis that is nice and tough to handle rough and tumble driving. It’s paired with a trailer attached to the center of rotation of the chassis that makes the pair highly maneuverable.

In order to launch rockets, an air tank on the trailer is hooked up to some piping to launch four Nerf rockets. Charged up to just 40 psi, it’s capable of launching the rounds with plenty of power for play purposes. Paired with a elevation control and a servo to trigger the firing valve, it’s a complete system that can shoot on the go.

It’s a fun build that packs a punch, even if it doesn’t quite have the accuracy or range you might desire in an all-conquering Nerf combat platform. We’d love to see a similar build hooked up to some AI smarts to stalk targets independently of human control. Video after the break.

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