robot

994 Articles

Man’s Best Robotic Friend

September 17, 2018 by 4 Comments

When it comes to robotics, some of the most interesting work — and certainly the most hilarious — has come from Boston Dynamics, and their team of interns kicking robotic dogs over. It’s an impressive feat of engineering, and even if these robotic pack mules are far too loud for their intended use on the battlefield, it’s a great showcase of how cool a bunch of motors can actually be.

It’s not quite up there with the Boston Dynamics robots, but [Dimitris]’ project for the Hackaday Prize is an almost equally impressive assemblage of motors, 3D printed parts, SLAM processing and inverse kinematics. I suppose you could also kick it over and watch it struggle for laughs, too.

This robotic dog was first modeled in Fusion 360, and was designed with  22 Dynamixel AX-12A robot actuators: big, beefy, serial-controllable servos. Of course, bolting a bunch of motors to a frame is the easy part. The real challenge here is figuring out the kinematics and teaching this robot dog how to walk. This is still a work in progress, but so far [Dimitris] is able to move the spine, keep the feet level with the ground, and have the robot walk a little bit. There’s still work to do, but there’s an incredible amount of work that’s already been done.

The upcoming features for this robot include a RealSense camera mounted on the head for 3D visualization of the surroundings. There’s also plans for a tail, loosely based on some of the tentacle robots we’ve seen. It’s going to be a great project when it’s done, and it’s already an excellent entry for the Hackaday Prize.

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ICub Is The Robot That Is Equally Cute And Creepy

September 16, 2018 by 13 Comments

We shouldn’t say iCub — the humanoid robot from Italy — is creepy. After all, human-like robots are in their infancy and an early computer or automobile would hardly be indicative of where those industries would take us. You can see the little guy in the video below.

The effort is open source and was part of an EU project that has been adopted by 20 labs around the world. The video just shows a guy in VR gear operating the robot, but the website has a lot of technical information if you want to know more.

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The Tiny, Pocket-Sized Robot Meant For Hacking

September 15, 2018 by 7 Comments

The world is full of educational robots for STEAM education, but we haven’t seen one as small or as cute as the Skoobot, an entry in this year’s Hackaday Prize. It’s barely bigger than an inch cubed, but it’s still packed with motors, a battery, sensors, and a microcontroller powerful enough to become a pocket-sized sumo robot.

The hardware inside each Skoobot is small, but powerful. The main microcontroller is a Nordic nRF52832, giving this robot an ARM Cortex-M4F brain and Bluetooth. The sensors include a VL6180X time of flight sensor that has a range of about 100mm. Skoobot also includes a light sensor for all your robotic photovoring needs. Other than that, the Skoobot is just about what you would expect, with a serial port, a buzzer, and some tiny wheels mounted in a plastic frame.

The idea behind the Skoobot is to bring robotics to the classroom, introducing kids to fighting/sumo robots, while still being small, cheap, and cute. To that end, the Skoobot is completely controllable via Bluetooth so anyone with a phone, a Pi, or any other hardware can make this robot move, turn, chase after light, or sync multiple Skoobots together for a choreographed dance.

While the Skoobot is an entry for this year’s Hackaday Prize, the creator of the Skoobot, [Bill Weiler] is also making these available on Crowd Supply.

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Robots Invade Your Personal Space

September 5, 2018 by 13 Comments

If you have ever had to complete a task such as building a LEGO model over a remote connection, you will know that the challenges are like an absurd grade school group project. The person giving directions often has trouble describing what they are thinking, and the person doing the work has trouble interpreting what the instructor wants. “Turn the blue block over. No, only half way. Go back. Now turn it. No, the other way. NO! Not clockwise, downward. That’s Upward! Geez. Are you even listening‽” Good times.

While you may not be in this situation every day, the Keio University of Japan has an intuitive way to give instructors a way to physically interact with an instructee through a Moore/Swayze experience. The instructor has a camera in typical pirate parrot placement over the shoulder. Two arms are controlled by the instructor who can see through stereoscopic cameras to have a first-person view from across the globe. This natural way to interact with the user’s environment allows muscle memory to pass from the instructor to the wearer.

For some of the other styles of telepresence, see this deep-sea bot and a cylindrical screen that looks like someone is beaming up directly from the holodeck.

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Real Or Fake? Robot Uses AI To Find Waldo

August 30, 2018 by 26 Comments

The last few weeks have seen a number of tech sites reporting on a robot which can find and point out Waldo in those “Where’s Waldo” books. Designed and built by Redpepper, an ad agency. The robot arm is a UARM Metal, with a Raspberry Pi controlling the show.

A Logitech c525 webcam captures images, which are processed by the Pi with OpenCV, then sent to Google’s cloud-based AutoML Vision service. AutoML is trained with numerous images of Waldo, which are used to attempt a pattern match.  If a pattern is found, the coordinates are fed to PYUARM, and the UARM will literally point Waldo out.

While this is a totally plausible project, we have to admit a few things caught our jaundiced eye. The Logitech c525 has a field of view (FOV) of 69°. While we don’t have dimensions of the UARM Metal, it looks like the camera is less than a foot in the air. Amazon states that “Where’s Waldo Delux Edition” is 10″ x 0.2″ x 12.5″ inches. That means the open book will be 10″ x 25″. The robot is going to have a hard time imaging a surface that large in a single image. What’s more, the c525 is a 720p camera, so there isn’t a whole lot of pixel density to pattern match. Finally, there’s the rubber hand the robot uses to point out Waldo. Wouldn’t that hand block at least some of the camera’s view to the left?

We’re not going to jump out and call this one fake just yet — it is entirely possible that the robot took a mosaic of images and used that to pattern match. Redpepper may have used a bit of movie magic to make the process more interesting. What do you think? Let us know down in the comments!

This Is The Raspberry Pi Robot To Beat All Others

August 29, 2018 by 13 Comments

Before the introduction of the Raspberry Pi, building robots was hard. The best solution to turning motors on a chassis was repurposing an old roomba. For the brain, maybe you could throw Linux on a router and move your rover around with an old Linksys. Before that, you could buy a crappy robotics kit, thrown together in a box and sold as an ‘educational kit’. I’m sure there are a few readers out there that built robots by wire-wrapping HC11s.

Now we have 3D printers and Raspberry Pis, and with that comes a golden age of robotics. One of the best robot brains out there is the 8BitRobots Modules from [Tim Wilkinson], an entry for this year’s Hackaday Prize.

The 8BitRobots Modules are made up of a few components, not the least of which is a Pi Zero, a fantastically powerful (for its price) Linux computer that is available for five dollars. With an add-on board, cleverly named the RoBonnet, the Pi Zero gets PWM outputs for servos and ESCs, an H-bridge for motors, TTL serial, encoder inputs, a pressure and temperature sensor, an IMU, a power monitor, and everything else you need for a successful Pi robot.

But hardware is only one part of the equation. If you want to program a robot, you need a software stack that makes everything easy. That’s where the 8BitRobots distributed robot platform comes in. This is a bit of Javascript running on the Pi that allows you to program the robot in Blockly, a Scratch-like graphical programming environment that’s been adapted to run in a web browser. It’s an all-in-one solution to robotics development and programming, and an excellent addition to this year’s Hackaday Prize.

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NASA Wants You… To Design Their Robot

August 19, 2018 by 9 Comments

No one loves a good competition more than Hackaday. We run enough to keep anyone busy. But if you have a little spare time after designing your one inch PCB, you might check out the competition to develop a robotic arm for NASA’s Astrobee robot.

Some of the challenges are already closed, but there are quite a few still open for a few more months (despite the published closing date of and these look like great projects for a hacker. In particular, the software architecture and command, data, and power system are yet to start.

But don’t let the $25,000 fool you. That’s spread out over a number of awards for the entire series. Each task has an award that ranges from $250 to $5,000. However, you also have to win that award, of course. If you register, however, you do get a sticker that has flown on the space station.

If you haven’t seen Astrobee, it is a flying robot made to assist astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station. The robot is really a floating sensor platform that can do some autonomous tasks but can also act as a telepresence robot for flight controllers. You might enjoy the second video below if you haven’t seen Astrobee, before.

We covered the Astrobee before. If you’d like to visit the space station yourself, it isn’t quite telepresence, but Google can help you out.

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