robot

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Autonomous Agribots For Agriculture

May 18, 2018 by 16 Comments

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [TegwynTwmffat] is going all-in on autonomous robotics. No, it’s not a self-driving car with highly advanced features such as cruise control with lane-keeping. This is an autonomous robot that’s capable of driving itself. It’s a robot built for agriculture, and relative to other autonomous robotics projects, this one is huge. It’s the size of a small tractor.

The goal [Tegwyn]’s project is to build a robot capable of roving fields of crops to weed, harvest, and possibly fertilize the land. This is a superset of the autonomous car problem: not only does [Tegwyn] need to build a chassis to roll around a field, he needs accurate sensors, some sort of connection to the Internet, and a fast processor on board. The mechanical part of this build comes in the form of a rolling chassis that’s a bit bigger than a golf cart, and electrically powered (although there is a small Honda generator strapped to the back). The electronics is where this gets really interesting, with a rather large board built to house all the sensor and wireless modules, with everything controlled by a TC275, a multicore, 32-bit microcontroller that also has the world record for solving a Rubik’s cube.

Already, [Tegwyn] has a chassis and motor set up, and is already running some code to allow for autonomous navigation. It’s not much now — just rolling down a garden path — but then again, if you’re building a robot for agriculture, it’s not that hard to roll around an open field. You can check out a video of the bot in action below.

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Mike's robot dog

Mike’s Robot Dog Is A First Step In The Right Direction

May 8, 2018 by 13 Comments

Humans can traverse pretty much any terrain thanks to their legs and fast-acting balancing system. So if you want a robot which should have equal flexibility, legs are a good way to go, this confirmed by all the achievements of Boston Dynamics’ robots. It was therefore natural for [Mike Rigsby] to model his robot dog after Boston Dynamics’ dog-like robot, SpotMini.

The build log on his Hackaday.io page makes for interesting reading. For example, he started out with the legs oriented like SpotMini but found that when trying to stand, the front legs worked fine but the rear ones slid or the dog shifted rearward or both happened. His solution was to take a cue from his 1990s Sony robot dog, Aibo, by reversing the orientation of the rear legs. He then upgraded his servo motors to ones with double the torque and increased the strength of the legs’ structure. In the first video below, you can see that his dog now lifts itself up to a standing position perfectly.

So far, to give it more of a dog-like personality he’s mounted Google’s AIY Vision Kit which changes a light’s color based on the degree to which a person is smiling, though we think a wagging tail would work well too. The possibilities are endless but one step at a time. See the second video below for a demonstration of the use of the Vision Kit.

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Robot Radar Module

May 3, 2018 by 25 Comments

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Ted Yapo] is building a Robot Radar Module breakout board. His design uses the A111 60 GHz pulsed coherent radar (PCR) sensor from Acconeer AB (New Part alert!) .

The A111 is a low power, high precision sensor ideal for use in object detection or gesture sensing applications. The BGA package is tiny – 5.5 mm x 5.2 mm, but it does not appear very difficult for a hacker to assemble. The sensor includes an integrated baseband, RF front-end and Antenna in Package so you don’t have to mess with RF layout headaches. Acconeer claims the sensor performance is not affected with interference from noise, dust, color and direct or indirect light. Sensing range is about 2 m with a +/- 2 mm accuracy. And at just under $10 a pop for 10 units or more, it would make a nice addition to augment the sensor package on a Robot.

To get started, [Ted] is keeping his design simple and small – the break out board measures just 32 mm x 32 mm. The radar sensor itself doesn’t require any parts other than a crystal and its loading capacitors. A LDO takes care of the 1.8 V required by the A111. Three 74LVC2T45 chips translate the SPI digital interface from 1.8 V to external logic levels between 1.8 V to 5 V. The three level translation chips could possible be replaced by a single six or eight channel translator – such as one from the TXB series from TI. For his first PCB iteration, [Ted] is expecting to run in to some layout or performance issues, so if you have any feedback to give him on his design, check out his hardware repository on Github.

Acconeer provides a Getting Started guide for their Evaluation Kits, which includes a detailed Raspberry-Pi / Raspbian installation and an accompanying video (embedded after the break) targeted at hackers. We are eagerly looking forward to the progress that [Ted] makes with this sensor breakout. Combined with LiDAR ToF sensor breakout boards, such as the MappyDot, it would be a great addition to your robot’s sensing capabilities.

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The Cake Robot Is No Lie

April 28, 2018 by 12 Comments

[52 Skillz] didn’t know anything about building robots. So he decided to not just read about it or make a simple robot. He jumped right in and wanted to build a robot that could make a cake. It took about a year and a half but it now — mostly — works, as you can see in the video below.

Granted it isn’t perfect and it isn’t really all that practical. But as a learning exercise, it was certainly ambitious and successful. Apparently, you still have to scrape the bowl a little by hand to get some of the flour off the bowl walls. Also, loading the ingredients might be more work than just making it by hand, but that really isn’t the point.

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Heat Seeking Robot And Camera Tear Down

April 24, 2018 by 16 Comments

[Marco Reps] found an HT02 thermal imaging camera in his mailbox. He found the resolution was fine for looking at big objects but worthless for examining circuit boards. So he decided to just tear it into pieces — an urge we totally understand.

Inside was a thermopile sensor that was easy to reverse engineer. So [Marco] decided to rework a Raspberry Pi robot to use the camera and turn it into a heat seeker.

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Roomba-Riding Beer Butlers Will Serve Us All

April 21, 2018 by 7 Comments

[Josh] isn’t one to refuse a challenge, especially when robots are involved. The latest dare from friends and family? Build a beer robot that can bring beverages at everyone’s beck and call.

The build consists of two main parts: the refrigerated cooler and the butler part, which comes courtesy of a Roomba Discovery from a fellow roboticist. [Josh] is basing the design on double-walled and insulated restaurant coolers. He built the refrigerated beverage hold from two stainless steel trash cans, sized an inch or so apart in diameter, and filled the gap with expanding foam insulation. He then cut away several inches from the bottom of the liner can to make room for the cooling unit, reinstalled the drip tray, and made a [airflow-allowing platform] by drilling a bunch of holes in an antimicrobial plastic cutting board.

At first, he tried a Peltier unit from an electric Igloo cooler, but that doesn’t work as well as [Josh] hoped, so he’s redesigning the can to use a mini fridge compressor. This meant making custom evaporator and condenser coils from copper tubing to match the compressor’s load spec. Go through [Josh]’s build logs over on IO and you’ll get a free mini-course on expanding foam and refrigeration.

[Josh] is currently working on some different butler modes for this robot. These run the gamut from simply sitting nearby with cold beverages and opening with the wave of a hand to doing voice-triggered beverage butler-ing at everyone’s beck and call. We applaud his efforts thus far and will be following this one with great thirst interest to see how he handles navigation and voice control.

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Play Chess Against A Ghost

April 19, 2018 by 19 Comments

While chess had long been a domain where humans were superior to computers, the balance has shifted quite substantially in the computers’ favor. But the one thing that humans still have control over is the pieces themselves. That is, until now. A group has built a robot that both uses a challenging chess engine, and can move its own pieces.

The robot, from creators [Tim], [Alex S], and [Alex A], is able to manipulate pieces on a game board using a robotic arm under the table with an electromagnet. It is controlled with a Raspberry Pi, which also runs an instance of the Stockfish chess engine to play the game of chess itself. One of the obvious hurdles was how to keep the robot from crashing pieces into one another, which was solved by using small pieces on a large board, and always moving the pieces on the edges of the squares.

This is a pretty interesting project, especially considering it was built using a shoestring budget. And, if you aren’t familiar with Stockfish, it is one of the most powerful chess engines and also happens to be free and open-source. We’ve seen it used in some other chess boards before, although those couldn’t move their own pieces.

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