robots

125 Articles

Learn About Robot Arms By Building Pedro 2.0

November 22, 2024 by 13 Comments

Whether you’re a kid or a kid at heart, learning about science and engineering can be a lot more fun if it’s practical. You could sit around learning about motors and control theory, or you could build a robot arm and play with it. If the latter sounds like your bag of hammers, you might like Pedro 2.0.

Pedro 2.0 is a simple 3D-printable robot arm intended for STEAM education. If you’re new to that acronym, it basically refers to the combination of artistic skills with education around science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The build relies on components that are readily available pretty much around the world—SG90 servo motors, ball bearings, and an Arduino running the show. There’s also an NRF24L01 module for wireless remote control. All the rest of the major mechanical parts can be whipped up on a 3D printer, and you don’t need a particularly special one, either. Any old FDM machine should do the job just fine if it’s calibrated properly.

If you fancy dipping your toes in the world of robot arms, this is a really easy starting point that will teach you a lot along the way. From there, you can delve into more advanced designs, or even consider constructing your own tentacles. The world really is your octopus oyster.

Supercon 2023: Cuddly Companion Bots

October 30, 2024 by 4 Comments

Even in the advanced world of 2024, robots are still better in science fiction than in reality. Star Trek gave us the erudite and refined Data, Rogue One gave us the fierce yet funny K-2SO, and Big Hero 6 gave us the caring charmer named Baymax. All these robots had smarts, capability, and agency. More than that, though—they were faithful(ish) companions to humans, fulfilling what that role entails.

The thing is, we’re not gonna get robots like that unless somebody builds them. [Angela Sheehan] is a artist and an educator, and a maker—and she’s trying to create exactly that. She came down to the 2023 Hackaday Supercon to tell us all about her efforts to create cuddly companion bots for real.

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Supercon 2023: Jesse T. Gonzalez Makes Circuit Boards That Breathe And Bend

July 24, 2024 by 5 Comments

Most robots are built out of solid materials like metal and plastic, giving them rigid structures that are easy to work with and understand. But you can open up much wider possibilities if you explore alternative materials and construction methods. As it turns out, that’s precisely what [Jesse T. Gonzalez] specializes in.

Jesse is a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and an innovator to boot. His talk at the 2023 Hackaday Supercon covers his recent work on making circuit boards that can breathe and bend. You might not even call them robots, but his creations are absolutely robotic.

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Gears Are Old And Busted, Capstans Are Cool

June 3, 2024 by 44 Comments

Zero backlash, high “gear” reduction, high torque transparency, silent operation, and low cost. What is this miracle speed reduction technology, you ask? Well, it’s shoelaces and a bunch of 3D printed plastic, at least in [Aaed Musa]’s latest installment in his series on developing his own robot dog.

OK, the shoelaces were only used in the first proof of concept. [Aaed] shortly upgrades to steel cable, and finds out that steel fatigues and snaps after a few hours. He settles on Dyneema DM-20, a flexible yet non-stretching synthetic rope.

Before it’s all over, he got a five-bar linkage plotting with a pencil on the table and a quadriped leg jumping up and down on the table — to failure. All in all, it points to a great future, and we can’t wait to see the dog-bot that’s going to come out of this.

There’s nothing secret about using capstan drives, but we often wonder why we don’t see cable-powered robotics used more in the hacker world. [Aaed] makes the case that it pairs better with 3D printing than gears, where the surface irregularities really bind. If you want to get a jumpstart, the test fixture that he’s using is available on GitHub.

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The Aimbot V3 Aims To Track & Terminate You

April 11, 2024 by 18 Comments

Some projects we cover are simple, while some descend into the sort of obsessive, rabbit-hole-digging-into-wonderland madness that hackers everywhere will recognize. That’s precisely where [Excessive Overload] has gone with the AimBot V3, a target-tracking BB-gun that uses three cameras, two industrial servos, and an indeterminate amount of computing power to track objects and fire up to 40 BB gun pellets a second at them.

The whole project is overkill, made of CNC-machined metal, epoxy-cast gears, and a chain-driven pan-tilt system that looks like it would take off a finger or two before you even get to the shooty bit. That’s driven by input from the three cameras: a wide-angle one that finds the target and a stereo pair that zooms in on the target and determines the distance from the gun, using several hundred frames per second of video. This is then used to aim the BB gun stock, a Polarstar mechanism that fires up to 40 pellets a second. That’s fed by a customized feeder that uses spring wire.

The whole thing comes together to form a huge gun that will automatically track the target. It even uses motion tracking to discern between a static object like a person and a dart fired by a toy gun, picking the dart out of the air at least some of the time.

The downside is that it only works on targets with a retroreflective patch: it includes a 15 watt IR LED on the front of the gun. The camera detects the bright reflection and uses it to track the target, so all you have to do to avoid this particular Terminator is make sure you aren’t wearing anything too shiny.

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In Defense Of Anthropomorphizing Technology

February 7, 2024 by 56 Comments

Last week I was sitting in a waiting room when the news came across my phone that Ingenuity, the helicopter that NASA put on Mars three years ago, would fly no more. The news hit me hard, and I moaned when I saw the headline; my wife, sitting next to me, thought for sure that my utterance meant someone had died. While she wasn’t quite right, she wasn’t wrong either, at least in my mind.

As soon as I got back to my desk I wrote up a short article on the end of Ingenuity‘s tenure as the only off-Earth flying machine — we like to have our readers hear news like this from Hackaday first if at all possible. To my surprise, a fair number of the comments that the article generated seemed to decry the anthropomorphization of technology in general and Ingenuity in particular, with undue harshness directed at what some deemed the overly emotional response by some of the NASA/JPL team members.

Granted, some of the goodbyes in that video are a little cringe, but still, as someone who seems to easily and eagerly form attachments to technology, the disdain for an emotional response to the loss of Ingenuity perplexed me. That got me thinking about what role anthropomorphization might play in our relationship with technology, and see if there’s maybe a reason — or at least a plausible excuse — for my emotional response to the demise of a machine.

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Robots: How The Pros Keep Them Safe

November 15, 2023 by 4 Comments

Robotic safety standards are designed for commercial bots, but amateur robot builders should also consider ideas like the keepout zone where a mobile robot isn’t permitted to go or how to draw out the safety perimeter space for your experimental robot arm. After all, that robot arm won’t stop crushing your fingers because you built it yourself. So, it is worth looking at the standards for industrial robots, even if your aim is fun rather than profit.

The basics of this for fixed robots like robot arms are defined in the standard R15-06. You don’t need to read the full text (because it costs $325 and is *incredibly* tedious to read), but the Association for Advancing Automation has a good background on the details. The bottom line is to ensure that a user can’t reach into an area that the robot arm might move to and provide a quick and easy way to disable the motors if someone does reach in.

Robots that move, called Industrial Mobile Robots (IMRs) or Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) bring in a whole new set of problems, though, because they are designed to move around under their own control and often share space with humans. For them, the standard is called R15.08. The AGV network has a good guide to the details, but again, it boils down to two things: make sure the robot is keeping an eye on its surroundings and that it can stop quickly enough to avoid injury.