Oh, The Places You’ll Go With Stop Motion Animation

November 5, 2023 by Adam Fabio 5 Comments

Robots made of broken toy parts, stop-motion animation, and a great song to tie it all together were not on our bingo card for 2023, but the results are perfect. [Mootroidxproductions] recently released the official music video for I Fight Dragons 2019 song “Oh the Places You’ll Go”.

The song was written by lead vocalist [Brian Mazzaferri] with inspiration from the classic Dr. Seuss book. [Brian] wrote it for his newborn daughter, and we’re pretty sure it will hit any parent right in the feels.

[Mootroidxproductions] isn’t a parent themselves, but they expanded on the theme to create a video about sacrificing oneself to save a loved one. With a self deprecating wit, they take us through the process of turning broken Bionicle parts, bits of Gundam, Lego, and, armature wire to make the two robots in the film. He also explains how he converted garbage into sets, greebles, and lighting effects.

The robots had to be designed so that they could fulfill their roles in the film. From the size of their hands down to their individual walking gaits, he thought of everything. His encyclopedic knowledge of Bionicle parts is also on full display as he explains the origin of the major parts used to build “Little Blue” and “Sherman”

Click through the break for both the main video and the behind-the-scenes production.

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Life-Sized Rock’em Sock’em Robot Will Definitely Knock Your Block Off

October 3, 2023 by Richard Baguley 2 Comments

He knocked his block off! That’s what [Zach] of Byte Sized Engineering is planning on saying when he completes this Rock’em Sock’em Robots replica. The twist? His replica is going to be life-sized. The original game involved two players, each controlling a robot that could punch and block with two lever-driven arms. [Zach] is looking to scale that up to human sized, but with a few interesting technical additions.

This build might be a bit large to be driven by a small child, so for the punching action [Zach] is using a four-bar linkage moved by a pneumatic cylinder. After some modelling, he decided on a 16mm bore and 100mm stroke cylinder that should provide a good, quick pneumatic action, but without putting so much force in that it destroys the whole thing. The aim is to knock his block off, not to permanently remove his block and take someone else’s block with it. This first video details his first prototype of the arm and the first set of tests, with later videos hopefully getting more into the mechanism and technical details of the build. We’d also like to see (hint, hint [Zach]) some of the files and code to follow up with.

Bonus fact: as older Brits may tell you, the game was marketed for some time there under the name “Raving Bonkers“, with the robots renamed as Basher Bonker and Biffer Bonker. The name didn’t catch on, and they changed back to the Rock’em Sock’em robots name. Ask someone in the UK these days if they want to play raving bonkers with your basher, and you will probably get your own block knocked off. Video below the break. Continue reading “Life-Sized Rock’em Sock’em Robot Will Definitely Knock Your Block Off” →

Helping Robots Learn By Letting Them Fail

September 17, 2023 by Richard Baguley 12 Comments

The [MIT Technology Review] has just released its annual list of the top innovators under the age of 35, and there are some interesting people on this list of the annoyingly accomplished at a young age. Like [Lerrel Pinto], an associate professor of computer science at NY University. His work focuses on teaching robots how to do things in the home by failing.

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Ask Hackaday: What’s The Deal With Humanoid Robots?

July 31, 2023 by Lewin Day 43 Comments

When the term ‘robot’ gets tossed around, our minds usually race to the image of a humanoid machine. These robots are a fixture in pop culture, and often held up as some sort of ideal form.

Yet, one might ask, why the fixation? While we are naturally obsessed with recreating robots in our own image, are these bipedal machines the perfect solution we imagine them to be?

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Pretty Small Robot Is Capable, Nonetheless

May 30, 2023 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

When science fiction authors imagined robots in the 20th century, many of them were huge imposing steel automatons. [Shane]’s designs for the Pretty Small Robot are quite contrary to that, being tiny in stature and cute in affect .

The whole robot is an exploration in nifty engineering. It uses an easy clip-together structure with fasteners and glue not required. The chassis is 3D printed, with all the components sliding into place. Two small DC gearmotors are used for differential drive, with each side of the robot having a pair of wheels wrapped in a rubber band for traction. The brains of the robot is an ESP32, providing it with both plenty of processing power and good connectivity options. Control is over WiFI via MQTT.

At this stage the robot doesn’t do a whole lot, though [Shane] has some exciting plans. He’d like to add a camera in future and let it explore a maze under human command.

If you’ve ever wanted to build a robot with an almost coin-sized foot print, this build is for you. Files are available on GitHub for those wishing to dive deeper. Video after the break.

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An orange and green stained glass robot arm sits on a table with a yellow lace tablecloth. It suspends a teabag over a brown teacup. You can see green leaves outside the window behind the bot.

Glass Robot From A Solarpunk Future

May 24, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 5 Comments

You may have heard of a heart of glass or have a glass jaw, but have you ever seen a glass robot?

[Simone Giertz], has taken two of her favorite things, stained glass and robotics, and fused them into a single project. Using an existing metal robot arm as a template, she cut and soldered her stained glass panels before reassembling the robot with its new solarpunk limbs. During testing though, one of the glass panels repeatedly failed at a solder joint.

Undaunted, [Giertz] replaced the faulty piece with an original metal component allowing this “grandma cyberpunk-core” bot to prepare tea as intended. We really love when makers bring us through the whole process, mishaps and all, and [Giertz] never disappoints in this respect. We do wonder a bit about the long-term health impacts of making tea with a robot containing leaded solder though.

If you’re interested in more robots made from unusual materials, checkout this gripper made from a dead spider or this work on phase changing robots.

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Robotic Coffee Comes To Brooklyn, But Will It Stay?

May 21, 2023 by Donald Papp 25 Comments

Robots are cool. Everyone knows it, and [Eater NY] highlights a coffee shop with a robotic server opening in Brooklyn. While robots able to prepare and serve drinks or food is not new, it isn’t every day a brick-and-mortar café with a robot behind the counter opens up. But expensive automation isn’t the only puzzle piece needed to make a location work.

A robotic coffee shop (like a robotic burger joint) certainly offers novelty, but can it sustain itself beyond that?

As one example, the linked article above points out that the city of New York prohibits entirely cashless businesses. Establishments must accept cash payments, and it’s unclear how the touchscreen-driven system would comply with that requirement.

There are also many tasks involved in running even a modest establishment — loading, cleaning, and maintaining for example — that can’t be realistically taken care of by an immobile robot barista. It’s unclear to what extent the robotic coffee shop will employ human staff, but it’s clear that human involvement is something that isn’t going be eliminated any time soon.

Some of you may remember the robotic burger joint that our own Brian Benchoff managed to check out, and many of his same observations come to mind. The robot burger was perhaps ahead of its time (its single location is listed as closed on Google maps with no recent activity) but maybe the robot coffee place can make it work. Still, expensive automation is only one piece of a system, and the ability to crank out a drink per minute 24/7 might not actually be the missing link.