Watching robots doing sports is pretty impressive from a technical viewpoint, although we secretly smile when we compare these robots’ humble attempts to our own motoric skills. Now, a new robot named Robomintoner seeks to challenge human players, and it’s already darn good at badminton.
Continue reading “Robomintoner Badminton Bot To Defeat Amateur Humans”
For all their joking about “reinventing the wheel”, the team behind Ourobot made a very cool robot (German, automatic translation here). The team, at the University of Applied Sciences in “Bielefeld, Germany“, built their wheel out of twelve segments, each with its own servo motor, a 3D-printed case, and a pressure sensor mounted on the outside of the wheel. The latter, plus some clever programming, allows the robot wheel to vary its circular gate and climb up over obstacles automatically.
There are a bunch of interesting constraints in designing the control for this bot. The tracks on the ground, naturally, have to adjust their relative angles so that they lie each flat on the surface, even if that surface isn’t itself flat or level. The segments in the air are unconstrained, but the sum of all the servos’ interior angles has to add up to 1800 degrees, and these angles control where its center of gravity is.
Our head is spinning. The paper, “OUROBOT – A Self-Propelled Continuous-Track-Robot for Rugged Terrain” is unfortunately behind the IEEE paywall, but goes into detail if you can find it. Continue reading “Ourobot: What Happens When A Snake Bot Swallows Its Own Tail”
As robot projects go, [creative ideas km]’s isn’t going to impress many Hackaday readers. Still, as an art project or something to do with the kids, it might be fun. But the reason it caught our interest wasn’t the actual robot, but the improvised soldering iron used in its construction.
The robot itself isn’t really autonomous. It is just a battery, a motor, and a switch. The motor vibrations make the robot scoot around on its bent copper wire legs. Some hot glue holds it all together, but the electrical wiring is soldered.
If you look at the video below, you’ll see the soldering is done with an unusual method. A disposable lighter generates a flame that hits an attached copper wire with a coil wound in it. The coil acts as a heat exchanger, and the wire becomes a soldering iron tip.
Continue reading “Simple Beetle Robot Uses Smoking Soldering Iron”
There is a giant spider the size of a house stretching its massive, delicate legs as it parades through the French city of Nantes. Is the Arthropod Apocalypse upon us? Fortunately not, for this arachnid is the latest in a series of performance pieces by a French theatre company, La Machine.
Like the rest of La Machine’s productions, this spider is a large hydraulically controlled model driven not by a computer with a single operator but by a team of operators perched inside and underneath the mechanism who turn the operation of the spider’s legs into a piece of complex choreography. They in turn are aided by a team on the street who ensure that any manoeuvres are executed safely. The spider only gives the appearance of walking as it is supported on a hydraulic arm from a wheeled vehicle that carries its power plant, so freed of the requirement for support from its legs it can move with extreme grace.
The video below shows the spider inching its way underneath a set of tram cables. There is more video on the page linked above.
Daughter boards for microcontroller systems, whether they are shields, hats, feathers, capes, or whatever, are a convenient way to add sensors and controllers. Well, most of the time they are until challenges arise trying to stack multiple boards. Then you find the board you want to be mid-stack doesn’t have stackable headers, the top LCD board blocks the RF from a lower board, and extra headers are needed to provide clearance for the cabling to the servos, motors, and inputs. Then you find some boards try to use the pins for different purposes. Software gets into the act when support libraries want to use the same timer or other resources for different purposes. It can become a mess.
The alternative is to unstack the stack and use external boards. I took this approach in 2013 for a robotics competition. The computer on the robots was an ITX system which precluded using daughter boards, and USB ports were my interface of choice. I used a servo controller and two motor controllers from Pololu. They are still available and I’m using them on a rebuild, this time using the Raspberry Pi as the brain. USB isn’t the only option, though. A quick search found boards at Adafruit, Robotshop, and Sparkfun that use I2C.
Boston Dynamics, the lauded robotics company famed for its ‘Big Dog’ robot and other machines which push mechanical dexterity to impressive limits have produced a smaller version of their ‘Spot’ robot dubbed ‘SpotMini’.
A lightweight at 55-65 lbs, this quiet, all-electric robot lasts 90 minutes on a full charge and boasts partial autonomy — notably in navigation thanks to proprioception sensors in the limbs. SpotMini’s most striking features are its sleek new profile and manipulator arm, showing off this huge upgrade by loading a glass into a dishwasher and taking out some recycling.
Robots are prone to failure, however, so it’s good to know that our future overlords are just as susceptible to slipping on banana peels as we humans are.
3D printers were never meant to be used for production. They’re not manufacturing machines, they’re prototyping machines. That doesn’t mean 3D printers can’t be used in a manufacturing context, it’s just very hard – you’d need someone manning a fleet of machines, or some sort of ‘automated build platform’ that won’t be invented for exactly fourteen years.
In the absence of someone paid to watch printers print, [Mark], [Robert], and [James] at tend.ai have created a way to manage a fleet of printers with a robot arm. It’s a robotic arm that automatically monitors the LCD on a rack full of 3D printers, plucks the finished prints off the bed, drops the parts in a box, and starts another print.
Tend.ai is in the business of cloud robotics, and have designed a system that takes any robotic arm, any webcam, and provides the backend for this robotic arm to – wait for it – tend to other machines. As a demo, it works well. Parts are picked up off of the machines, dropped into boxes, and another print run started.
As a tech demo for a cloud robotics platform, you can’t do much better than this. As a way to automate a fleet of 3D printers, I can only wonder how this robot arm system would work with large, flat printed parts. A robotic gripper could always be replaced with a spatula, I guess.
You can check out the demo and the ‘how they did it’ video below.
