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Category Archives: robotics
Ask Hackaday: What Good Is a Robot Dog?
It is said that Benjamin Franklin, while watching the first manned flight of a hot air balloon by the Montgolfier brothers in Paris in 1783, responded when questioned as to the practical value of such a thing, “Of what practical use is a new-born baby?” Dr. Franklin certainly had a …read more
Posted in Ask Hackaday, autonomous, boston dynamics, canine, Current Events, dog, Interest, military, robotics, robots hacks, safety, spot
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Building A Robot Rover For Those Tough Indoor Missions
Making an outdoor rover is easy stuff, with lots of folk having them doing their roving activities on beaches and alien worlds. Clearly the new frontier is indoor environments, a frontier which is helpfully being conquered by [Andreas Hoelldorfer]’s Mantis Rover.
OK, we’re kidding. This project started out life as …read more
Bringing Battle Bots into the Modern Classroom
With the wide array of digital entertainment that’s available to young students, it can be difficult for educators to capture their imagination. In decades past, a “volcano” made with baking soda and vinegar would’ve been enough to put a class of 5th graders on the edge of their seats, but …read more
Do You Know Where Your Drone is Headed? HJWYDK Article Explores Limits of MEMS Sensors
Knowing in what absolute direction your robot is pointed can be crucial, and expensive systems like those used by NASA on Mars are capable of calculating this six-dimensional heading vector to within around one degree RMS, but they are fairly expensive. If you want similar accuracy on a hacker budget, …read more
Posted in compass, Hackaday Columns, heading, HJWYDK, MEMS, robotics, science
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A 3D Printed Robotic Chariot for Your Phone
As we’ve said many times in the past, the wide availability of low-cost modular components has really lowered the barrier to entry for many complex projects which previously would have been nigh-on impossible for the hobbyist to tackle. The field of robotics has especially exploded over the last few years, as now even $100 can put together a robust robotics experimentation platform which a decade ago might have been the subject of a DARPA grant.
But what if you want to go even lower? What’s the cheapest and easiest way to put together something like a telepresence robot? That’s exactly …read more
Posted in 3D printed robot, ESP8266, gear motor, L298N, Microcontrollers, robotics, robots hacks, rover
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Inventors Chasing Their Dreams; What It’s Like to Quit Your Job and Hack
The phrase “Hindsight is 20/20” is one of those things that we all say from time to time, but rarely have a chance to truly appreciate to the fullest. Taken in the most literal context, it means that once you know the end result of a particular scenario, you can look back and clearly see the progression towards that now inescapable endgame. For example, if you’re stuck on the couch with a bad case of food poisoning, you might employ the phrase “Hindsight is 20/20” to describe the decision a few days prior to eat that food truck sushi.
Then …read more
Welding Robot Takes on a Hot, Dirty, Dangerous Job
They used to say that robots would take over the jobs too dirty or dangerous for humans. That is exactly what [Joel Sullivan] had in mind when he created this welding robot. [Joel] designed the robot for the OSB industry. No, that’s not a new operating system, it’s short for Oriented Strand Board. An engineered lumber, OSB is made of strands (or chips) of wood. It’s similar to plywood but doesn’t require large thin sheets of lumber. To make a panel of OSB, a 5-inch thick matt of wood chips is mixed with glue and compressed down to 5/16″ at …read more
Posted in lumber, oriented strand board, osb, robotics, robots hacks, welder, welding
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SMORES Robot Finds Its Own Way To The Campfire
Robots that can dynamically reconfigure themselves to adapt to their environments offer a promising advantage over their less dynamic cousins. Researchers have been working through all the challenges of realizing that potential: hardware, software, and all the interactions in between. On the software end of the spectrum, a team at University of Pennsylvania’s ModLab has been working on a robot that can autonomously choose a configuration to best fit its task at hand.
We’ve recently done an overview of modular robots, and we noted that coordination and control are persistent challenges in this area. The robot in this particular demonstration …read more
One-Legged Jumping Robot Shows That Control Is Everything
Robots that can jump have been seen before, but a robot that jumps all the time is a little different. Salto-1P is a one-legged jumping robot at UC Berkeley, and back in 2017 it demonstrated the ability to hop continuously with enough control to keep itself balanced. Since then it has been taught some new tricks; having moved beyond basic stability it can now jump around and upon things with an impressive degree of control.
Key to doing this is the ability to plant its single foot exactly where it wants, which allows for more complex behaviors such as hopping …read more
Posted in inverted pendulum, jumping, motion capture, motion control, one-legged, pogo, robot, robotics, robots hacks, salto-1p, slip, uc berkeley
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Gesture Control without Fancy Sensors, Just Pots and Weights
[Dennis] aims to make robotic control a more intuitive affair by ditching joysticks and buttons, and using wireless gesture controls in their place. What’s curious is that there isn’t an accelerometer or gyro anywhere to be seen in his Palm Power! project.
The gesture sensing consists not of a fancy IMU, but of two potentiometers (one for each axis) with offset weights attached to the shafts. When the hand tilts, the weights turn the shafts of the pots, and the resulting readings are turned into motion commands and sent over Bluetooth. The design certainly has a what-you-see-is-what-you-get aspect to it, …read more
Posted in diy, gesture control, Joystick, motion control, pendulum, pot, robotics, robots hacks, The Hackaday Prize
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