Have you ever wondered what exactly is involved in building a working, radio-controlled R2-D2 robot replica? This vid documents the two-year process of Victor Franco, of Southern California, and his friends building an R2, mainly from scratch-built parts of varying materials, including wood, styrene, resin, and aluminum. He also used some parts provided by members of the R2 Builders Club. Nice work! [Thanks to Chris James and Michelle Iva Cook Hlubinka!]
Victor Franco’s Blog
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Guilherme Martins wanted a simple Arduino-compatible board that he could use as a robotics platform, so he designed one. Called the Motoruino, he took a standard Arduino board and added an H-Bridge chip so that it can control two motors directly. Of course, you could certainly get the same functionality using an add-on board such as the MotorShield (or even by making your own on a breadboard). If you know you are going to be making a robot, though, I can certainly see that having everything together on a single piece would help make your project smaller and more reliable.
He is working on some final tweaks, and plans to release the project under the Creative Commons license. Cool stuff! [via Lets Make Robots]
In the Maker Shed:
MotorShield for Arduino Kit
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Spotted in the MAKE Forums:
Liam built this impressive robot, then used it to demonstrate the difference between proportional and PID control. The robot is designed to stay a certain distance from an object, and uses two Sharp IR distance sensors to track it’s position. The system looks like it is working great, however he is noticing some variability in the output of the distance sensors he is using- anyone have any ideas?
This is the GBOT with a PID controller using the ZX-40A microcontroller from http://www.zbasic.net. ZX-40A is based on the ATMEGA644 AVR chip. Inputs include 2 IR range sensors (GP2D12). Outputs include 2 PWM signals to the Pololu motor driver (VNH2SP30).
The GBOT maintains a setpoint distance of 10-inches from a target and maintains that distance, no matter what. The control system was originally coded with P-control only and resulted in excessive overshoot and oscillations. So then I added PID control. See video to observe P-control vs. PID control.
Had trouble with IR sensor noise. Issue mitigated with hardware and software. Hardware… added low ESR 1,000uF capacitors on VIN and VOUT of the LM2940T voltage regulator. Software includes an 8th order butterworth filter to clean IR sensor position and velocity. I did have issues with a fire, probably caused by a short or the motor driver. Not sure yet. Since isolating the regulator with the filters and after adding a large heatsink to the voltage regulator, no more fires. See picture below of “incident”.
Anyone have experience or information on GP2D12 IR sensor distance variability? I have the noise reduced to 0.025″ amplitude. Can this be reduced further? Thanks.
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This guy was manufactured by Odetics, Inc. in Anaheim, California, in 1984. From its page on The Old Robots Website:
Odex 1, from Odetics, Inc. ; is a six-legged walking robot that weighed only 300 pounds. Its onboard computer could be operated remotely and the robot moved under its own power. It is capable of reconfiguring its shape to be tall and slender or short and squat, and able to walk in either configuration or anywhere between the two. Each leg is able to lift 400 lbs, the “legs” are versatile enough to be used as manipulators as well. Odex is capable of lifting over 2,100 lbs vertically, or carrying over 900 lbs. at normal walking speed. To display Odex 1 agility, engineers commanded the robot to walk to a truck, get on the truck, and then get off and actually move the truck.
[via BotJunkie]
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Neil Fraser’s Lava Lamp Centrifuge is 10′ across, weighs 50 pounds, and spins at 42 rpm generating 3 Gs. It uses a Nexus One’s accelerometer to measure g-force. Excellent!
Will lava lamps work in a high-gravity environment such as Jupiter? This topic spawned considerable lunch-time discussion and no clear consensus emerged. Most people initially assumed that the wax would sink to the bottom and wouldn’t cycle, but as the physics was examined in greater depth this assumption became difficult to defend.
To find out how lava lamps behave in super-terrestrial gravity, I built a large centrifuge in my living room. This was intended to be a fun activity for a long weekend in January. However the project’s size and power requirements were well outside my previous experience. Thus it was a rich learning experience as I encountered one metal-shredding and wire-melting failure after another. In the end, perseverance paid off and I obtained the answer to the original question.
[Thanks, hectocotyli!]
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Kevin Haw created this Robosapien web server, using an Arduino he bought in the Maker Shed. He writes:
In late 2009 I bought an Arduino from the Maker Shed Store and began playing with it. Early on I was very intrigued by two separate projects: Karl Castleton’s RoboSapienIR and the basic WebServer that came with the Ethernet library. I decided to combine the two in order to make a web enabled robot. RoboSpaienServer is the result.
RoboSapienServer
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Travis Deyle, of the awesome robot site Hizook, sent us a link to his page rounding up developments on this MIT telepresence system, called the MeBot. [Thanks, Travis!]
MeBot: An Affective Teleconferencing Robot from MIT Being Presented at HRI 2010
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Szymon Kobalczyk, one of my collaborators on the Generic Serial Driver for Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform project, recently posted a link in our forum to the FEZ line of .NET-powered microcontroller kits. Shortly after that, Gus Issa from GHI Electronics (makers of the FEZ) got in touch, and sent kits to both Simon and me. Simon’s had a chance to play around with the kit and build the robot shown in the video above:
Two reflective sensors are included in the kit (useful for line following and edge detection projects), and you can order additional components both from TinyCLR.com and other robotics sites. Many construction parts are included in the kit so it is very easy to attach additional sensors or other parts. As you can see on the picture above, I already added a Sharp IR distance sensor in front (so I can teach the robot to not bump on walls). I also added an Xbee expansion board on the back so one day I can control the robot remotely (and my Holy Grail is to connect the robot to Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio).
…
In my previous post I complained how upset I’m that there is no cheap .NET Micro Framework hardware for hobbyists. Now I can take it back. IMHO we finally have a very powerful alternative to Arduino and similar platforms, with the price that won’t break the bank (especially with FEZ Mini).
The FEZ comes in two form factors: the FEZ Mini, which has a pin configuration that’s compatible with the BASIC Stamp from Parallax; the FEZ Domino, which is pin-compatible with the Arduino USB models (and they even have a beta driver for the WIZnet Ethernet module used in Arduino Ethernet shields).
First day with FEZ Mini Robot Kit
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Solarbotics has posted some video from its vault, portions of the 1995 BEAM Games, with BEAM inventor Mark Tilden talking about his VBug 1.5 (built from little more than a couple of Sony Walkmans and an Oven Timer Unit). I bought a BEAM VHS tape back then (I think of this event), which included this footage. It was horrible quality and I had to listen to it over and over again to piece together what he was saying. This is a little better, but still hard to hear and likely for hardcore BEAMers only.
I definitely still remember the impact it had on me and how much rethinking it made do about what constitutes a robot, artificial “intelligence,” etc. If a “dumb bot,” with basically some analog oscillators and relays for “brains,” can successfully navigate a space by simple bump sensor/switches, or simply by bouncing off of things, is it any less successful/intelligent than a robot that has digital processors, code, sophisticated sensors, and builds maps of its world and negotiates those? The BEAM answer is, of course: No.
Mark Tilden explaining Walkman (VBug1.5) at the 1995 BEAM Robot Games
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On Wednesday morning, Evan Ackerman over at BotJunkie posted about MIT’s Flyfire system. The idea behind the system is simple and very exciting: Swarms of tiny LED-carrying robot helicopters arrange themselves in the air to make 2D or 3D displays in which each bot serves as a single pixel. Evan linked to the project’s homepage on MIT’s SENSEable City Lab server and embedded a video posted by the group to YouTube showing the individual prototype swarmbots, which already exist, and some computer renderings of what the working displays would look like. Exciting, eh?
Within an hour of Evan’s post going live, MIT took down the FlyFire page and the YouTube video. Or at least password-protected them. I can imagine why they might not want the traffic surge bogging down their own servers, but why yank the YouTube video? Why wouldn’t they want people paying attention to this project?
Update: Looks like both the project page and their YouTube video are publicly accessibly again. Dunno what was going on, but clearly it was non-shady. Thanks, guys!
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