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1015 Articles

Nightmare Robot Only Moves When You Look Away

October 29, 2020 by 7 Comments

What could be more terrifying than ghosts, goblins, or clowns? How about a shapeless pile of fright on your bedroom floor that only moves when you’re not looking at it? That’s the idea behind [Sciencish]’s nightmare robot, which is lurking after the break. The Minecraft spider outfit is just a Halloween costume.

In this case, “looking at it” equates to you shining a flashlight on it, trying to figure out what’s under the pile of clothes. But here’s the thing — it never moves when light is shining on it. It quickly figures out the direction of the light source and lies in wait. After you give up and turn out the flashlight, it spins around to where the light was and starts moving in that direction.

The brains of this operation is an Arduino Uno, four light-dependent resistors, and a little bit of trigonometry to find the direction of the light source. The robot itself uses two steppers and printed herringbone gears for locomotion. Its chassis has holes in it that accept filament or wire to make a cage that serves two purposes — it makes the robot into more of an amorphous blob under the clothes, and it helps keep clothes from getting twisted up in the wheels. Check out the demo and build video after the break, because this thing is freaky fast and completely creepy.

While we usually see a candy-dispensing machine or two every Halloween, this year has been more about remote delivery systems. Don’t just leave sandwich bags full of fun size candy bars all over your porch, build a candy cannon or a spooky slide instead.

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Do Your Part To Stop The Robot Uprising

October 21, 2020 by 11 Comments

One of the pleasures of consuming old science fiction movies and novels is that they capture the mood of the time in which they are written. Captain Kirk was a 1960s guy and Picard was a 1990s guy, after all. Cold war science fiction often dealt with invasion. In the 1960s and 70s, you were afraid of losing your job to a computer, so science fiction often had morality tales of robots running amok, reminding us what a bad idea it was to give robots too much power. As it turns out, robots might be dangerous, but not for the reasons we thought. The robots won’t turn on us by themselves. But they could be hacked. To that end, there’s a growing interest in robot cybersecurity and Alias Robotics is releasing Alurity, a toolbox for robot cybersecurity.

Currently, the toolbox is available for Linux and MacOS with some support for Windows. It targets 25 base robots including the usual suspects. There’s a white paper from when the product entered testing available if you want more technical details.

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Worm Bot Inches Along As You’d Expect

October 18, 2020 by No comments

Robot locomotion is a broad topic, and there are a multitude of choices for the budding designer. Often, nature is an inspiration, and many ‘bots have been built to explore the motion regimes of various insects and animals. Inspired himself by the common inch worm, [jegatheesan.soundarapandian] decided to build a robot that moved in a similar way.

The build consists of a series of 3D printed linkages, with servos fitted in between. This allows the robot’s body to articulate and flex in much the same way as a real inch worm. By flexing the body up, shifting along, and flexing back down, the robot can slowly make its way along a surface. An Arduino Pro Mini is the brains of the operation, being compact enough to fit on the small robot while still having enough outputs to command the multiple servos required. Control is via a smartphone app, using MIT’s AppInventor platform and the venerable HC-05 Bluetooth module.

It’s a fun build, and we’d love to see it go further with batteries replacing the tether and perhaps some sensors to enable it to further interact with its environment. We’ve seen other creative 3D-printed designs before, too – like this spherical quadruped ‘bot. Video after the break.

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Robot Travels The World

October 17, 2020 by 7 Comments

Around the World in 80 Days may have been an impressive feat of international travel in a world before widespread air transit. In modern times though, it’s not even necessary to leave your home in order to travel around the world. To that end, [Norbert] is attempting to accomplish this journey using a robot that will do the traveling for him as part of this year’s Virtual Maker Faire.

The robot is called the World Tour Robot, and the idea for it is to be small enough to ship to each new location around the world and be simple enough to be repaired easily. It is driven by two servo motors and controlled by a Raspberry Pi which also handles a small camera. Once at its location, it can connect to the internet and then be able to be controlled through a web interface. Locations are selected by application, and the robot is either handed off to the next person in the chain or put back in a box to be shipped.

The robot hasn’t left for its maiden voyage just yet but [Norbert] plans to get it started soon. Hopefully there are enough interesting places for this robot to explore on its trip around the world, although it’s probably best to avoid Philadelphia as it is known to be unfriendly to robots.

Robot Gets Around On All Fours, Thanks To Many, Many Servos

October 13, 2020 by 2 Comments

As far as robots are concerned, wheels and tracks are great ways to get around when you’ve got serious work to do. However, if you want to build something that feels more animal than machine, building a walking ‘bot is the way to go. [Technovation] delivers a great example in the form of this quadruped design.

It’s a build executed in the modern style, taking full advantage of contemporary design tools and processes. The entire robot is built around twelve servo motors that provide rotation and translation to the robot’s joints. After importing the servo models into Fusion 360, [Technovation] set about building the rest of the body around them. An Arduino Uno runs the show, which addresses the many servos thanks to a Sensor Shield that has a multitude of useful outputs.

[Technovation] put a specific focus on durability and robustness during the design phase. The platform is intended as a test bed for various walking styles and gaits, and thus any hardware failures would be an unnecessary distraction from the project’s goals. The chassis is a great platform to learn on, and we expect to see further developments in future.

The eerily lifelike robots from Boston Dynamics may have set a high bar, but DIYers are still out there having a crack at building capable walking robots. Video after the break.

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Educational Robot Teaches With Magnets And Servos

October 8, 2020 by 1 Comment

Teaching kids about robotics gives them valuable skills for their futures, and is generally pretty darn fun for all involved, too. However, teaching children often involves taking a bit of a different tack to educating college students, and more of a hand-holding approach is often needed. This robot project is an attempt to do just that, using some classic time-honored techniques and a unique method of propulsion.

The Magnetic Motion Robot, or MMR, is very much a DIY project. Built out of hand-cut plywood and assembled by lacing together individual modules, it’s a low-cost entry into the world of educational robotics. Rather than wheels or motors, it instead uses electromagnets mounted on servo arms to get around. Switching the magnets on and off, and moving the servos in time, allows the robot to pull itself along a ferromagnetic surface.

The robot is outfitted with buzzers and LEDs, and using these features creates further programming challenges for students. Naturally, there’s also a line-following program, which is a great way to begin educating kids about autonomous robot operations. It’s all run from an Arduino Nano, programmed with Makeblock’s special building-block programming software.

While its DIY nature makes assembly a little more involved than the average off-the-shelf kit, it does present its own learning opportunities such as soldering and the integration of hardware. Educational robots will continue to be popular and fun long into the future; we’re a particular fan of sumobots ourselves. Video after the break.

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Light Tracking Robot Relies On LDRs

October 8, 2020 by 26 Comments

These days, when doing any sort of optical tracking, our mind immediately leaps towards sophisticated solutions. Raspberry Pis, high end cameras, and machine learning toolchains all come to mind. Of course, if your goals are simpler, you needn’t complicate the issue. PHIL is a light tracking robot who is perfectly happy to do it the old-school way.

PHIL consists of an Arduino Uno running a twin-servo motion platform, providing the sensor head with pan and tilt functionality. The sensor head itself consists of a 3D-printed cruciform-section shroud that mounts four light-dependent resistors in individual sections. The shroud helps block light to the off-angle sensors, giving a stronger difference between those exposed to the light directly and those on the dark side. This makes for a stronger difference signal, so when the Arduino reads the sensors, it’s much clearer which way PHIL should point the sensor head to follow the light.

The builder, [Sean O’Donovan], notes that PHIL was built with no practical purpose in mind, and is simply a cool project. We certainly agree, and it’s important to note that skills picked up on a project like this will invariably come in handy down the track. Such techniques can be highly useful for tracking the sun, for example. Video after the break.

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