Japanese Fire-Fighting Dragon Rides Water Jets

If you are building a robot to fight fires, why not use the water that you are fighting fires with to propel your robot? That seems to be the idea behind the Dragon Fire Fighting robot built by [Professor Satoshi Tadokoro], and his team at Tadohoku University. Their dragon robot is raised by the same directed jets of water that are used to stop the fire.

The three-meter robot also uses these jets of water to steer, moving the dragon’s head by firing water jets at angles. I’m not sure how practical it really is, though: the jets that the robot uses to steer could do as much damage as the fire itself if it wasn’t used carefully. The idea is to attach it to the end of a ladder or crane used by firefighters, so it can explore a building on fire without anyone having to step inside.

The robot was built as part of the Tough Robotics Challenge, a program that is looking to build robots that can help in disasters. Japan is one of the most disaster-prone places on the planet, thanks to earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, and Godzilla attacks, so the program is looking to build robots that can help out. Some of the concepts they are looking at include cyborg animals, a listening drone that can help find survivors after a disaster using a sensitive microphone array and a serpentine robot that can map pipes and underground structures.

[Via TechXplore and Qes]

 

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Robot Dances To The Beat Of New YouTube Subs

Sure, you could build some kind of numerical counter to keep track of new YouTube subscribers. But does an increasing digit display truly convey the importance of such an event? Of course not. What you need is something that recognizes this achievement for what it is and celebrates it with you. Something like Subby, the Interactive YouTube Subscriber Robot.

Whenever [brian brocken] gets a new subscriber, Subby’s little TV screen face lights up, and he either dances, salutes, or does another move within his impressive range of motion. [brian] wrote a Visual Basic app that searches his channel’s page for the subscriber count and sends it to the Nano’s COM port over serial every thousand milliseconds. [brian]’s got the VB app and all the STL files available on IO through Dropbox. Moonwalk past the break to watch Subby get down.

We like that Subby is too focused on celebrating each new subscriber to care about the total number itself. Maybe he could be programmed to do some extra special moves whenever the channel hits a milestone.

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Turning That Old Hoverboard Into A Learning Platform

[Isabelle Simova] is building Hoverbot, a flexible robotics platform using Ikea plastic trays, JavaScript running on a Raspberry Pi and parts scavenged from commonly available hoverboards.

Self-balancing scooters a.k.a. Hoverboards are a great source of parts for such a project. Their high torque, direct drive brushless motors can drive loads of 100 kg or more. In addition, you also get a matching motor controller board, a rechargeable battery and its charging circuit. Most hoverboard controllers use the STM32F103, so flashing them with your own firmware becomes easy using a ST-link V2 programmer.

The next set of parts you need to build your robot is sensors. Some are cheap and easily available, such as microphones, contact switches or LDRs, while others such as ultrasonic distance sensors or LiDAR’s may cost a lot more. One source of cheap sensors are car parking assist transducers. An aftermarket parking sensor kit usually consists of four transducers, a control box, cables and display. Using a logic analyzer, [Isabelle] shows how you can poke around the output port of the control box to reverse engineer the data stream and decipher the sensor data. Once the data structure is decoded, you can then use some SPI bit-banging and voltage translation to interface it with the Raspberry Pi. Using the Pi makes it easy to add a cheap web camera, microphone and speakers to the Hoverbot.

Ikea is a hackers favourite, and offers a wide variety of hacker friendly devices and supplies. Their catalog offers a wide selection of fine, Swedish engineered products which can be used as enclosures for building robots. [Isabelle] zeroed in on a deep, circular plastic tray from a storage table set, stiffened with some plywood reinforcement. The tray offers ample space to mount the two motors, two castor wheels, battery and the rest of the electronics. Most of the original hardware from the hoverboard comes handy while putting it all together.

The software glue that holds all this together is JavaScript. The event-driven architecture of Node.js makes it a very suitable framework to use for Hoverbot. [Isabelle] has built a basic application allowing remote control of the robot. It includes a dashboard which shows live video and audio streams from the robot, buttons for movement control, an input box for converting text to speech, ultrasonic sensor visualization, LED lighting control, message log and status display for the motors. This makes the dashboard a useful debugging tool and a starting point for building more interesting applications. Check the build log for all the juicy details. Which other products from the Ikea catalog can be used to build the Hoverbot? How about a robotic Chair?

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A HID For Robots

Whether with projects featured here or out in the real world, we have a tendency to focus most upon the end product. The car, solar panel, or even robot. But there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes that needs to be taken care of as well, whether it’s fuel infrastructure to keep the car running, a semiconductor manufacturer to create silicon wafers, or a control system for the robot. This project is one of the latter: a human interface device for a robot arm that is completely DIY.

While robots are often automated, some still need human input. The human input can be required all the time, or can be used to teach the robot initially how to perform a task which will then be automated. This “keyboard” of sorts built by [Ahmed] comes with a joystick, potentiometer, and four switch inputs that are all fully programmable via an Arduino Due. With that, you can perform virtually any action with whatever type of robot you need, and since it’s based on an Arduino it would also be easy to expand.

The video below and project page have all the instructions and bill of materials if you want to roll out your own. It’s a pretty straightforward project but one that might be worth checking out since we don’t often feature controllers for other things, although we do see them sometimes for controlling telescopes rather than robots.

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The Robots Were Coming! The Robots Were Coming!

The recent influx of home assistants proves that everything old is new again. If we told you about a life-sized robot that was self-charging, had a map of your home for navigation, and responded to voice commands, you’d assume we were going to point you to a Kickstarter or a new product release. Instead, we will point you to this post about a robot marketed in 1985.

You have to put all this in context. In 1985 the personal computer was practically a solution in search of a problem. Back then it was wildly popular to predict that every home would one day have a computer. But we weren’t quite sure what they were going to be doing with it. Home finance, games, and storing recipes were all popular guesses. A few far-sighted folks realized that music, photos, and even video might one day be major selling points. Everyone wanted a piece of this market but no one really understood what the market would look like.

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This Robot Barfs Comics!

If there’s one thing that’s more fun than a comic, it’s a randomly generated comic. Well, perhaps that’s not true, but Reddit user [cadinb] wrote some software to generate a random comic strip and then built a robot case for it. Push a button on the robot and you’re presented with a randomly generated comic strip from the robot’s mouth.

The software that [cadinb] wrote is in Processing, an open source programming language and “sketchbook” for learning to code if you’re coming from a visual arts background. The Processing code determines how the images are cropped and placed and what kind of background they get. Each image is hand drawn by [cadinb] and has information associated with it so the code knows what the main focus of the image is. Once the panels are created, the final image is passed on to a thermal printer for printing. Everything is controlled from a Python script running on a Raspberry Pi and the code, strip artwork, and case is all available online to check out.

Now that the comic can print, a case is needed for the printer and controls. [cadinb] designed a case in Illustrator after creating a prototype out of foam core. The design was laser cut and then coloured – the main body with fabric dye and the arms stained with coffee!

Now [cadinb] has a robot that can sit on his table at conventions and a fan can press a button and have a randomly generated comic strip printed out before their eyes! We have a neat article about printing a comic on a strand of hair, and one about bringing the Banana Jr. 6000 to life!

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Smiling Robot Moves Without Wires

What could be cuter than a little robot that scuttles around its playpen and smiles all day? For the 2018 Hackaday prize [bobricius] is sharing his 2D Actuator for Micro Magnetic Robot. The name is not so cute, but it boasts a bill of materials under ten USD, so it should be perfect for educational use, which is why it is being created.

The double-layer circuit board hides six poles. Three poles run vertically, and three of them run horizontally. Each pole is analogous to a winding in a stepper motor. As the poles turn on, the magnetic shuttle moves to the nearest active pole. When the perpendicular windings activate, it becomes possible to lock that shuttle in place. As the windings activate in sequence, it becomes possible to move left/right and forward/back. The second video demonstrates this perfectly.

[bobricius] found inspiration from a scarier source, but wants us to know this is his creation, not a patent infringement. We are not lawyers.

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