A Glimpse Into The Mind Of A Robot Vacuum Cleaner

October 25, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 19 Comments

What’s going through the mind of those your autonomous vacuum cleaning robots as they traverse a room? There are different ways to find out such as covering the floor with dirt and seeing what remains afterwards (a less desirable approach) or mounting an LED to the top and taking a long exposure photo. [Saulius] decided to do it by videoing his robot with a fisheye lens from near the ceiling and then making a heatmap of the result. Not being satisfied with just a finished photo, he made a video showing the path taken as the room is being traversed, giving us a glimpse of the algorithm itself.

The robot he used was the Vorwerk VR200 which he’d borrowed for testing. In preparation he cleared the room and strategically placed a few obstacles, some of which he knew the robot wouldn’t get between. He started the camera and let the robot do its thing. The resulting video file was then loaded into some quickly written Python code that uses the OpenCV library to do background subtraction, normalizing, grayscaling, and then heatmapping. The individual frames were then rendered into an animated gif and the video which you can see below.

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A Robot Arm From The Cupboard

October 16, 2016 by Jenny List 4 Comments

Building a simple robot arm is a lot more straightforward than it used to be. If you have a laser cutter, or a bit of cash and don’t mind waiting for postage, there are inexpensive kits like the MeArm. If you have a 3D printer, there are any number of 3D-printed designs for you to tackle. What if you need to satisfy your urge to build a robot arm really quickly, and you don’t have a laser cutter or 3D printer? You’ve got a pile of servos from that remote-control project, how can you make the rest?

If you are [roboteurs], you raid the stationery cupboard, and create an arm using rubber bands, paper clips, and binder clips. The binder clips grip the servo arms and hold the whole thing together, the rubber bands provide extra attachment , and the paper clips are bent to form the jaws. It’s not the prettiest or perhaps the most capable of arms, but it undeniably is an arm, and we’d doubt it could be done any more cheaply.

In this particular case, the arm serves as a demonstration piece for [roboteurs]’ Printabots Maker Kit for people without a 3D printer. It uses their controller board, but there is no reason why it could not be used with any other board capable of driving servos.

We’ve covered innumerable robot arms over the years, This one may be the cheapest, but another contender might be this cardboard arm. None of them, however, are as cool as this steam-powered Armatron toy.

TensorFlow Robot Recognizes Objects

October 9, 2016 by Al Williams 7 Comments

Children can do lots of things that robots and computers have trouble with. Climbing stairs, for example, is a tough thing for a robot. Recognizing objects is another area where humans are generally much better than robots. Kids can recognize blocks, shapes, colors, and extrapolate combinations and transformations.

Google’s open-source TensorFlow software can help. It is a machine learning system used in Google’s own speech recognition, search, and other products. It is also used in quite a few non-Google projects. [Lukas Biewald] recently built a robot around some stock pieces (including a Raspberry Pi) and enlisted TensorFlow to allow the robot to recognize objects. You can see a video of the device, below.

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Simulate Your Robot Before You Build It

October 9, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 12 Comments

[Nurgak] shows how one can use some of the great robotic tools out there to simulate a robot before you even build it. To drive this point home he builds the tutorial off of the easily 3D printable and buildable Robopoly platform.

The robot runs on Robot Operating System at its core. ROS is interesting because of its decentralized and input/output agnostic messaging system. For example, if you leave everything alone but swap out the motor output from actual motors to a simulator, you can see how the robot would respond to any arbitrary input.

[Nurgak] uses another piece of software called V-REP to demonstrate this. V-REP is a simulation suite for robotics and has a few ROS nodes built in. So in order to make a simulated line-following robot, [Nurgak] tells V-REP to send a simulated camera image to the decision making node of the robot in ROS. It then sends the movement messages back to V-REP which drives the pretend robot around.

He runs through a few more examples, proving that it’s entirely possible to become if not a roboticist, at least a really good AI programmer without ever dropping the big money on parts to build a robot.

Line Follower With No Arduino

September 27, 2016 by Al Williams 40 Comments

There’s hardly a day that passes without an Arduino project that spurs the usual salvo of comments. Half the commenters will complain that the project didn’t need an Arduino. The other half will insist that the project would be better served with a much larger computer ranging from an ARM CPU to a Cray.

[Will Moore] has been interested in BEAM robotics — robots with analog hardware instead of microcontollers. His latest project is a sophisticated line follower. You’ve probably seen “bang-bang” line followers that just use a photocell to turn the robot one way or the other. [Will’s] uses a hardware PID (proportional integral derivative) controller. You can see a video of the result below.

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The Arduino Sleeps With The Fishes

September 23, 2016 by Al Williams 8 Comments

[Eric Dirgahayu] wanted to explore underwater with some sensors and cameras. First, he needed a platform to carry them. That led to his Arduino-controlled swimming fish. The fish is made from PVC and some waterproof servos. From the video (see below) it isn’t clear how much control the fish has, but it does swim with an undulating motion like a real fish.

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Canary Island Team Wins World Robotic Sailing 2016

September 22, 2016 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

If you’re like us, you had no idea that there even was a World Robotic Sailing Championship. But we’re glad that we do now! And congratulations to the team of A-Tirma G2, the winning boat. (Link in Spanish, difficult to translate — if you can figure out how, post in the comments?)

The Championship has apparently been going on for nine years now, and moves to a different location around the world each year. The contests for 2016 (PDF) are by no means trivial. Besides a simple there-and-back regatta, the robot boats have to hold position, scan a prescribed area, and avoid a big obstacle and return quickly back to their lane. All of this with wind power, of course.

The winning boat used solid sails, which act essentially as vertical wings, and was designed for rough weather. This paid off in the area-scanning test; the winds were so strong that the organizers considered calling it off, but team A-Tirma’s boat navigated flawlessly, giving them enough points to win the event even though camera malfunction kept them from completing the obstacle avoidance.

Unless you’ve sailed, it’s hard to appreciate the difficulty of these challenges to an autonomous vehicle. It’s incredibly hard to plan far ahead because the boat’s motive power source, the wind, isn’t constant. But the boat has, relatively speaking, a lot of inertia and no brakes, so the robot has to plan fairly far in advance. That any of the 2-4 meter long boats could stay inside a circle of 20 meters is impressive. Oh, and did we mention that A-Tirma did all of this calculating and reacting on solar power?

Because the wind is so fickle, drone sailboats are much less popular than drone motorboats — at least using the Hackaday Blogpost Metric ™. The hackerboat project is trying out sails, but they’re still mostly working on powered propulsion. We do have an entry in the 2016 Hackaday Prize, but it’s looking like the development process is in the doldrums. Still, sailing is the best way to go in the end, because windpower is essentially free on the open ocean, which means less work for the solar panels.

As far as role-models go, you’ve basically got the entrants in the World Robotic Sailing Championships. So kudos to the A-Tirma team, and thanks [Nikito] for the tip!