Maybe One Of The Most Adorable Obstacle Avoiding Robots You’ve Seen

July 12, 2020 by Orlando Hoilett 2 Comments

We’re all pretty well-acquainted with the obstacle avoiding robot. These little inventions use a proximity sensor to detect an object in front of the robot, then circumvent the object accordingly. Brown Dog Gadgets’ little robot really caught our eye, mostly because it’s kind of cute.

This little robot combines a few LEGO pieces, Arduino, and Brown Dog Gadgets’ own in-house invention, Crazy Circuits. The LEGO pieces make up the body of the robot, craftily enclosing a small portable battery pack used to power the bot. Brown Dog Gadgets uses another home-grown design, their robotics controller board, breaking out a few GPIO pins of an Arduino-compatible microcontroller into LEGO-compatible connections. This makes it easy to interface two of our favorite DIY STEM tools using a solderless connection.

Add a few LEGO wheels and a caster for pivoting and you’ve got a pretty simple, little robot. Fortunately, Brown Dog Gadgets was very thorough in their write-up, so head on over to their Instructable for all the details.

In the meantime, we’ve got a rich history of obstacle-avoiding robots here on Hackaday. Take a look around.

Animatronic Nikola Tesla Sets The Record Straight

July 8, 2020 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

While the Hackaday reader likely knows all about Nikola Tesla and his incredible body of work, the same can’t necessarily be said for the average passerby. Even a child can be counted on to know the names of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, but as [Daniel Springwald] laments, the name Tesla is more often associated with the line of sleek electric cars than the brilliant Serbian inventor they were named for.

Hoping to level the playing field a bit, [Daniel] has come up with a way for the great man to plead his case. This custom designed robotic facsimile of the alternating current aficionado is able to speak about Tesla’s life and accomplishments in an interactive, if rather creepy, format.

There isn’t a lot of technical detail on this one yet, but what we can glean from the image gallery and video below is that there are an incredible number of OpenSCAD-designed 3D printed parts knocking around inside Mr. Tesla’s head. Add into the mix a healthy dose of springs, linkages, and servos, and you’re just a mustache short of a museum exhibit.

Most of the animatronic projects we’ve covered in the past have been based on animals, so it’s certainly interesting to see what goes into approximating human mannerisms mechanically. We’re not sure if this talking Tesla head will help educate the masses, but it’s certainly an impressive technical achievement.

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Assemble Your (Virtual) Robotic Underground Exploration Team

May 26, 2020 by Roger Cheng 6 Comments

It’s amazing how many things have managed to move online in recent weeks, many with a beneficial side effect of eliminating travel making them more accessible to everyone around the world. Though some events had a virtual track before it was cool, among them the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (SubT) robotics competition. Recent additions to their “Hello World” tutorials (with promise of more to come) have continued to lower the barrier of entry for aspiring roboticists.

We all love watching physical robots explore the real world, which is why SubT’s “Systems Track” gets most of the attention. But such participation is necessarily restricted to people who have the resources to build and transport bulky hardware to the competition site, which is just a tiny subset of all the brilliant minds who can contribute. Hence the “Virtual Track” which is accessible to anyone with a computer that meets requirements. (64-bit Ubuntu 18 with NVIDIA GPU) The tutorials help get us up and running on SubT’s virtual testbed which continues to evolve. With every round, the organizers work to bring the virtual and physical worlds closer together. During the recent Urban Circuit, they made high resolution scans of both the competition course as well as participating robots.

There’s a lot of other traffic on various SubT code repositories. Motivated by Bitbucket sunsetting their Mercurial support, SubT is moving from Bitbucket to GitHub and picking up some housecleaning along the way. Together with the newly added tutorials, this is a great time to dive in and see if you want to assemble a team (both of human collaborators and virtual robots) to join in the next round of virtual SubT. But if you prefer to stay an observer of the physical world, enjoy this writeup with many fun details on systems track robots.

Spherical Quadruped Arduino Robot

May 21, 2020 by Orlando Hoilett 9 Comments

[Greg06] started learning electronics the same way most of us did: buy a few kits, read a few tutorials, and try your hardest to put a few things together. Sound familiar? After a while, you noticed your skills started increasing, and your comfort level with different projects improved as well. Eventually, you try your hand at making your own custom projects and publishing your own tutorials.

Few are lucky to have a first-project as elaborate as [Greg06’s] quadruped robot. We don’t know about you, but for some of us, we were satisfied with blinking two LEDs instead of just one.

[Greg06’s] robot has a quadruped based, housed within a 3D printed spherical body. The legs are retractable and are actuated by tiny servo motors inside the body. [Greg06] even included an ultrasonic distance sensor for the obstacle avoidance mechanism. Honestly, if it weren’t for the ultrasonic distance sensor protruding from the spherical body, you might think that the entire robot was just a little Wiffle ball. This reminds us of another design we’ve seen before.

If that weren’t enough, the spherical head can rotate, widening the range of the ultrasonic distance sensor and obstacle avoidance mechanism. This is accomplished by attaching another servo motor to the head.

Pretty neat design if you ask us. Definitely one of the coolest quadrupeds we’ve seen.

Robotic Open Source Puppy Needs A Home

May 12, 2020 by Richard Baguley 20 Comments

Personally, I am a fan of the real thing, but dogs aren’t an option for all. Plus, robotic dogs are easier to train and don’t pee on your couch. If you are looking to adopt a robotic companion, Stanford Pupper might be a good place to start. It’s a new open source project from the Stanford Robotics Student group, a group of robotic hackers from Stanford University. This simple robotic quadruped looks pretty simple to build, but also looks like a great into to four-legged robots.

This is the first version of the design, but it looks pretty complete, built around a carbon fiber and 3D printed frame. The carbon fiber parts have to be cut out on a router, but you can order them pre-cut here, and you might be able to adapt it to easier materials. The Pupper is driven by twelve servos powered from a 5200 mAh 2S LiPo battery and a custom PCB that distributes the power. That means it could run autonomously.

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Compliant Quadruped Legs Using Servos

March 22, 2020 by Danie Conradie 4 Comments

Walking robots that move smoothly are tricky to build and usually involve some sort of compliant leg mechanism — a robot limb that can rebound like natural physiology for much better movement than what a stiff machine can accomplish. In his everlasting quest to build a real working robot dog, [James Bruton] is working on an affordable and accessible Mini Robot Dog, starting with the compliant leg mechanism.

The 3D printed leg mechanism has two joints (hip and knee), with an RC servo to drive each. To make the joints compliant, both are spring-loaded to absorb external forces, and the deflection is sensed by a hall effect sensor with moving magnets on each side. Using the inputs from the hall effect sensor, the servo can follow the deflection and return to its original position smoothly after the force dissipates. This is a simple technique but it shows a lot of promise. See the video after the break.

A project can sometimes develop a life of its own, or in the case of [James]’s OpenDog, spawn experimentally evolving offspring. This is number four, and it’s designed to be a platform for learning how to make a quadruped walk properly, and to be simple and cheap enough for others to build. We’re looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

If you missed it, also check out this robot’s weird sibling, self-balancing Sonic.

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DARPA Challenge Autonomous Robot Teams To Navigate Unfinished Nuclear Power Plant

March 6, 2020 by Roger Cheng 4 Comments

Robots might be finding their footing above ground, but today’s autonomous robots have a difficult time operating underground. DARPA wanted to give the state of the art a push forward, so they are running a Subterranean (SubT) Challenge which just wrapped up its latest round. A great review of this Urban Circuit competition (and some of the teams participating in it) has been published by IEEE Spectrum. This is the second of three underground problem subdomains presented to the participants, six months apart, preparing them for the final event which will combine all three types.

If you missed the livestream or prefer edited highlight videos, they’re all part of DARPAtv’s Subterranean Challenge playlist. Today it starts with a compilation of Urban Circuit highlights and continues to other videos. Including team profiles, video walkthrough of competition courses, actual competition footage, edited recap videos, and the awards ceremony. Half of the playlist are video from the Tunnels Circuit six months ago, so we can compare to see how teams performed and what they’ve learned along the way. Many more lessons were learned in the just-completed Urban Circuit and teams will spend the next six months improving their robots. By then we’ll have the Caves Circuit competition with teams ready to learn new lessons about operating robots underground.

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