Pick-And-Place Machine For Candy

December 29, 2016 by Bryan Cockfield No comments

Every December and May the senior design projects from engineering schools start to roll in. Since the students aren’t yet encumbered with real-world detractors (like management) the projects are often exceptional, unique, and solve problems we never even thought we had. Such is the case with [Mark] and [Peter]’s senior design project: a pick and place machine that promises to solve all of life’s problems.

Of course we’ve seen pick-and-place machines before, but this one is different. Rather than identifying resistors and capacitors to set on a PCB, this machine is able to identify and sort candies. The robot — a version of the MeARM — has three degrees of freedom and a computer vision system to alert the arm as to what it’s picking up and where it should place it. A Raspberry Pi handles the computer vision and feeds data to a PIC32 which interfaces with the hardware.

One of the requirements for the senior design class was to keep the budget under $100, which they were able to accomplish using pre-built solutions wherever possible. Robot arms with dependable precision can’t even come close to that price restraint. But this project overcomes the lack of precision in the MeArm by using incremental correcting steps to reach proper alignment. This is covered in the video demo below.

Senior design classes are a great way to teach students how to integrate all of their knowledge into a final class, and the professors often include limits they might find in the real world (like the budget limit in this project). The requirement to thoroughly document the build process is also a lesson that more people could stand to learn. Senior design classes have attempted to solve a lot of life’s other problems, too; from autonomous vehicles to bartenders, there’s been a solution for almost every problem.

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Ask Hackaday: Dude, Where’s My MOSFET?

December 13, 2016 by Elliot Williams 126 Comments

(Bipolar Junction) Transistors versus MOSFETs: both have their obvious niches. FETs are great for relatively high power applications because they have such a low on-resistance, but transistors are often easier to drive from low voltage microcontrollers because all they require is a current. It’s uncanny, though, how often we find ourselves in the middle between these extremes. What we’d really love is a part that has the virtues of both.

The ask in today’s Ask Hackaday is for your favorite part that fills a particular gap: a MOSFET device that’s able to move a handful of amps of low-voltage current without losing too much to heat, that is still drivable from a 3.3 V microcontroller, with bonus points for PWM ability at a frequency above human hearing. Imagine driving a moderately robust small DC robot motor forwards with a microcontroller, all running on a LiPo — a simple application that doesn’t need a full motor driver IC, but requires a high-efficiency, moderate current, and low-voltage-logic compatible transistor. If you’ve been here and done that, what did you use?

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Use Machine Learning To Identify Superheroes And Other Miscellany

December 12, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 6 Comments

[Massimiliano Patacchiola] writes this handy guide on using a histogram intersection algorithm to identify different objects. In this case, lego superheroes. All you need to follow along are eyes, Python, a computer, and a bit of machine learning magic.

He gives a good introduction to the idea. You take a histogram of the colors in a properly cropped and filtered photo of the object you want to identify. You then feed that into a neural network and train it to identify the different superheroes by color. When you feed it a new image later, it will compare the new image’s histogram to its model and output confidences as to which set it belongs.

This is a useful thing to know. While a lot of vision algorithms try to make geometric assertions about the things they see, adding color to the mix can certainly help your friendly robot project recognize friend from foe.

Train Your Robot To Walk With A Neural Network

December 11, 2016 by Elliot Williams 22 Comments

[Basti] was playing around with Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), and decided that a lot of the “hello world” type programs just weren’t zingy enough to instill his love for the networks in others. So he juiced it up a little bit by applying a reasonably simple ANN to teach a four-legged robot to walk (in German, translated here).

While we think it’s awesome that postal systems the world over have been machine sorting mail based on similar algorithms for years now, watching a squirming quartet of servos come to forward-moving consensus is more viscerally inspiring. Job well done! Check out the video embedded below.

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Otto Bot Is Bob’s Grandson

December 4, 2016 by Elliot Williams 15 Comments

The Otto DIY robot has just taken first place in the coveted role as “best robot to 3D print for your (inner) child”. It’s cute, it dances, it doesn’t cost too much, it’s completely open source, and it’s not impossible to write code for. It’s probably the most refined Bob design that we’ve seen yet. Watch it move in the video below.

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This Robot Goes Through Life Sideways

December 4, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 12 Comments

We humans walk funny. Pivoting one leg forward at the hip creates an offset that puts us off-balance sideways. We have to compensate for this with each step we take. Many robots handle this by instead taking small, calculated steps. Enter NABiRoS, the Non Anthropomorphic Bipedal Robot System (link to the video below). The ‘Non Anthropomorphic’ means that it doesn’t walk like a human, and yet the ‘Bipedal’ means it still walks on two legs. The difference is that it walks sideways.

Here’s how the folks from RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) at UCLA did it. Imagine you rotated both your legs 90 degrees such that they were facing in opposite directions. Then you rotate your upper body 90 degrees to face one of your legs. You can now move your legs to walk in the direction you’re facing and there’ll be no more tilting sideways each time you take a step. The joints are also simpler as only a single degree of freedom is needed in each of the knee and hip joints. The ankles and feet are done with a compliant, or an elastic, joint much as you see with a lot of prosthetic legs. As you can see in the video below, in addition to walking, they can do some surprisingly active things such as hopping up and down and what we can only call skipping. In fact, the result is sometimes very human.

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Building Your Bots The 1980s Way

November 25, 2016 by Jenny List 29 Comments

There are many kits available to today’s hobbyists who wish to try their hand at producing simple computer-controlled robots. Small concoctions of servos and laser-cut acrylic, to which boards such as the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or Beaglebone can easily be fitted.

In the 1980s though this was a market that was yet to be adequately served. The sheer size of the many 8-bit machines of the day meant they could not be incorporated in your robot, and interfacing to them was a bit more challenging than the easy-to-use GPIOs of their modern counterparts. Then the mechanical hardware of a small robot was something that had not been easily and cheaply packaged for the constructor, making building a physical robotic platform a significant task in itself.

[Jeffery Brace] and [Evan Koblentz] write for IEEE Spectrum about their work at New York City’s World Maker Faire back in October, making a pair of small robots using only components and computers available in the 1980s.

Charlie the robot

[Charlie] is a robot based on the Capsela construction system, a toy consisting of interlocking plastic spheres containing different functions of shafts, gears, and motors. There was a Robotic Workshop kit for Capsella that featured a Commodore 64 interface, and it is through this means that [Charlie]’s three motors are controlled. It includes a ROM that extends Commodore BASIC with extra commands, which allow the robot to be easily controlled.

Artie the robot, with Dacta box in foreground

Meanwhile [Artie] is a Lego robot, using the Dacta TC Logo, a kit sold for the educational market and available at the time with interfaces for the PC and the Apple II. They had a Dacta control box but not the Apple II card to go with it, so had to make do with a functional replica built on a prototyping card. As the name suggests, this was programmed using Logo, and came with the appropriate interpreter software.

Both robots are reported to have been a success in terms of working in the first place, then demonstrating the 1980s technology and providing entertainment and engagement with the faire’s visitors.

We have covered numerous Lego robots over the years, as a search of our site will confirm. But this is only the second time we’ve featured a Capsela project, the first being this Arduino rover from 2011. [Mike] mused why we don’t see Capsela more often, and the same sentiment is true today. Do you have a Capsela set gathering dust somewhere that could make a robotic project?

Via Hacker News.