Filed under: robots hacks

We love hardware modding, robots, and generally all things in the DIY category, but cartoons are pretty awesome too. The hilarious yet sadly short lived Nickelodeon cartoon Invader Zim was a favorite ours, due in no small part to a character called GIR, a little borderline insane robot. Not content with just a cartoon, a group of Montana State Univesity, Bozeman graduates have decided to build a real, functional GIR robot.

For those unfamiliar with the cartoon, GIR is a quirky, malfunctioning robot designed to help an alien named Zim take over Earth. Loaded with cameras, lights, and all manner of Inspector Gadget style devices in the cartoon, the team have their work cut out for them: if their version is even half as advanced as the cartoon version, it would be several generations more advanced than anything we've ever seen. So far, the team has only begun working on the head and neck, installing servos to control its motion, cameras, decorative LEDs in the eyes, and the software to control it all. According to [Arthur Krebsbach], one of the project contributors, this is a long term, open-ended project that will employ new technology as it becomes available. The project is a bit silly, but legitimately ambitious; [Krebsbach] notes, "I don't think we will ever be satisfied with the Gir until he can fly but runs out of fuel quickly because he replaced it all with Tuna."

[via JhnenVEE]

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Source: Juan Aguilar

Filed under: robots hacks, cons

DefconBots is returning again this year with their shooting gallery robot competition for Defcon 16. They've decided to leave the rules unchanged from last year. It's a head to head competition between fully autonomous guns. The first gun to shoot all the targets on their side of the board wins. The rules aren't very strict on design; as long as you use nonlethal nonmessy amunition and include a safety switch you're pretty much good to go. The DefconBots site has a reference design to put you on the fast track to competing. Defcon 16 is August 8-10, 2008 in Las Vegas.

Related: [Aaron Rasmussen]'s sentry gun we covered back in 2005

[photo: Bre Pettis]

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Source: Eliot Phillips

Filed under: robots hacks

Laughing Squid's [Scott Beale] is attending RoboGames 2008. Check out the great pictures and videos he took on Flickr.

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Source: Eliot Phillips

Filed under: robots hacks, news

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's NanoRobotics Lab have developed a robot that is capable of running on the surface of a pool of water. Like their wall climbing Waalbot, the Water Runner was inspired by the abilities of a lizard, in this case, the basilisk. The team studied the motions of the basilisk and found morphological features and aspects of the lizard's stride that make running on water possible. Both the lizard and the robot run on water by slapping the surface to create an air cavity like the one above, then push against the water for the necessary lift and thrust. Several prototypes have been built, and there are variants with 2 or 4 legs and with on and off-board power sources. You can see a slow motion video of the robot's movement below.

The purpose of their research is to create robots that can traverse any surface on earth and waste less energy to viscous drag than a swimming robot would. Though another of the team's goals is to further legged robot research, the Water Runner is not without potential practical applications. It could be used to collect water samples, monitor waterways with a camera, or even deliver small packages. Download the full abstract in PDF format for more information.

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Source: Juan Aguilar

Filed under: robots hacks

The Carnegie Mellon NanoRobotics Lab uses external magnetic fields to precisely control their nanosoccer players. The micro robots are just 300×300 micron specs of neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnets that have been laser machined. The working volume is surrounded by five electromagnetic coils. Four coils are used for position while the fifth provides clamping force to the work surface. The bot can be operated almost anywhere as long as the surface isn't magnetically active. Machine vision is used to watch the bot and provide feedback control. Embedded below is the robot moving across a glass slide next to a dime. It can travel at speeds up to 60 body lengths per second.

[via BotJunkie]

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Source: Eliot Phillips

Filed under: misc hacks, robots hacks

The fifth annual RoboGames is happening this weekend in San Francisco. RoboGames is a broad reaching competition designed to bring together specialists in all areas of robotics. Last year's event had 800 entries in 62 different events. The biggest audience draw is definitely the combat robots shown in the video above, but there are other skill and task based competitions. If you're in the area, this is definitely worth your time. Check out ROBOT magazine's coverage from last year to get an idea of what you'll see (or in our case miss).

[thanks io9]

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Source: Eliot Phillips

Filed under: robots hacks

[bre] passed along this portrait drawing robot from the same people that brought you the chief cook robot. Like the previous project, the portrait drawing bot emphasizes man machine interaction. The subject sits down and is asked for the quill. The robot captures the subject's image and runs it through several processing steps. One set is to determine the contours and another is to determine the fill. The robot then draws the the contours and fills returning to the ink pot each time it reaches a trajectory threshold. Quill drawing can be quite hard for novice illustrators, but the robot's smooth trajectory calculations prevent drips and stains.

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Source: Eliot Phillips

Filed under: robots hacks

Yesterday we looked at the Pac-Man Roomba casemod. In the video, creator [Ron Tajima] expressed interest in seeing Roombas participate in real life games. So we did some digging around and found some used in an interesting augmented reality game. From Brown University, these modified Roomba Create units play various games, like tag, with an underlying goal of developing smarter robots.

The setup consists of a Java powered client/server arrangement. The game server coordinates the Small Universal Robot Vehicles (SmURVs) and builds a database of events for future use. Players can also control the robots through a Java telepresence client.

The units themselves are made up of the iRobot Create with a Mini-ITX computer strapped to the top. They run Linux and communicate over WiFi with the server and players. They also have an IR emitter used in the games to "shoot" other units.

Gameplay has the server acting as the referee and humans only acting as instructors. The humans come into play when the robots are unable to respond based on their existing database of decision making policies. Through the client, players are able to see exactly what the robot sees with the addition of 3D overlays. Future plans for the game include removing the camera view and replacing with nothing but these overlays. One of the final goals of the project was to create a 24/7/365 gaming experience similar to what is found in MMOs and Xbox Live applications today.

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Source: Sean Percival

Filed under: robots hacks

[Ron Tajima] fashioned a Pac-Man casemod for his Roomba using 448 LEDs and a SH2 MPU control unit. It features the correct arcade sounds and even the death animation. The bot has Bluetooth access thanks to his previous Wiimote hack. He hopes to use this platform to create a real world version of the game.



For more Roomba hacking, check out the Hacking Roomba book and our previous Roomba related posts.

[via Geekdad]

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Source: Sean Percival

Filed under: robots hacks

It's caturday, so let's post some freaking cats. With a little research we found commercial, hobbyist, research, and cyborg cats.

First up is NeCoRo. Released in 2001, this is probably the most recognized commercial robot cat; renowned for its creepiness.

Not wanting to be shut out of a market Sega has developed their own creepy cat. Yume Neko Smile is available for $72 and as the video demonstrates, gets very annoyed when you pull its tail.


Household robot cats aren't a new invention. Straight out of the "Teddy Ruxpin era", comes Petster Deluxe. The fur covered robotic lump can avoid obstacles, respond to claps, or use a wired remote.


Philips Research's entry into this feline nightmare is the iCat. It's a 38cm tall cat equipped with 13 servos to control facial movements. The goal is to have shared platform for researching man machine interaction: man's interaction with weird looking cats.



Hobby robot company Dynamizer took the popularity of humanoid robots and developed an entry level cat robot. It's designed to be cheap and easy to expand with new sensors.


Above is a cat robot scratch built by Lim Tian Siak.


Finally, we have Elvis, the cyborg cat. He lost use of his hind legs in an accident, so his BattleBot building caretakers created a bot he could drive by pressing on two buttons. It seems, given the right equipment cats would spend their days spinning clockwise.

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Source: Eliot Phillips

Filed under: robots hacks, daily

[Jerome] sent in this awesome Muffin maker (yes, muffins) that [Carl Boucher] and [Dominic Dussault] built for [Carl]'s final project in his Industrial Electrical Technician program. No real technical details, just some tasty inspiration. If you prefer cookies, you might want to check out fabbing with Nutella.

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Source: Will O'Brien

Filed under: robots hacks

Here's something else we found while writing up our duplicate Ikea Linux Cluster post. [Janne] also built this simple linux robot. The robot uses the Qwerk robot controller, a webcam with the IR filter removed (something like this one), a usb WiFi card, an IR spotlight, and a set of repurposed model airplane wheels. The WiFi adapter and webcam attach directly to the Qwerk via its on-board usb ports; the servo motors are also connected via built-in ports. Although [Janne] doesn't post specific instructions, the Qwerk platform seems fairly easy to work with. Have a look at the Qwerk overview for more information.

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Source: Juan Aguilar

Filed under: misc hacks, robots hacks, daily

Most people make LEDs light up for their first microcontroller project. [Alex] built a "large scale dot matrix printer." This beast is a PIC controlled ground graffiti machine. As it rolls across the ground it deposits strategically located bits of spray paint. Rather than use actual spray paint, he opted for a set of solenoid controlled nozzles that shoot the paint downward.

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Source: Will O'Brien

Filed under: robots hacks

We feel the need to apologize immediately for the use of Yakkity Sax in the preceding video and recommend you watch the longer, yak free, video below. It shows researchers at the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory teaching a robot how to make a ham and cheese omelet. Each working area and food item is labeled with a machine recognizable tag. The researcher demonstrates the task by guiding the robot's hand. The robot combines multiple demonstrations to generalize the skill. It can then adapt the learned skill to the specific task. You can see this in the video when the robot adjusts to the location of the bowl and cutting board when they're moved around. Teaching through demonstration would make the use of robotics much easier for the general population.

[via Presurfer]

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Source: Eliot Phillips

Filed under: robots hacks

[Erik] Sent in this modular robot video. It's not as mentally disturbing as the snake robots we featured before, but it's still pretty cool. It looks like it's using M-TRAN modules. Details are completely lacking, so if you've got some, share 'em.

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Source: Will O'Brien

Filed under: robots hacks

[Amnon] sent in this demo of his groups voice controlled wheel chair. I couldn't find any details, but sometimes just a demo is enough to find some new inspiration. They connected a hm2007 speech recognition kit to an Innovation FIRST controller board on an electric wheel chair chasis. Additional sensors detect stairs and other obstacles.

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Source: Will O'Brien

Filed under: robots hacks

Uber-geek [James McLurkin] was in Austin recently demoing his robot swarm. He's on tour with EDA Tech Forum. [McLurkin] has multiple degrees from the MIT AI lab and worked at iRobot for a couple of years. Lately, he has been working on distributed robot computing: robot swarms.
[McLurkin] was an entertaining speaker and had an interesting view of robotics. He is optimistic that robot parts will become more modular, so it will be easier to build them, and more importantly, faster to design them.

Some quotes:

• "There's more sensors in a cockroach's butt than any robot"
• "12 engineer years to design, 45 minutes to build"
• "If it can break your ankle, it's a real [rc] car."

His swarm (pictured above) is made up of over a hundred small identical bots, but he only brought about a dozen with him. The demo was still quite impressive. He had the robots spread out, clump together, play follow the leader and circle the wagons. Each behavior had a very simple rule behind it. To spread out, for example, each robot tries to move away from it's nearest neighbor. The really fun part was when he had the robots perform a physical bubble sort. The rule for this was that each bot tried to put a higher-id bot on one side and a lower-id bot on the other. After a minute or so of bumping around the bots all lined up in id order.



I was interested in the details of the robot itself. Here's a picture with the parts labeled.

Each robot has a unique ID number. They communicate with each other via IR and have sensors so that they can tell which direction and how far away the other bots are. The lights on top are just indicators so you can tell what the bots are doing. A mesh network is rebuilt several times a second, creating a directed graph from the 'leader' (which can be any arbitrary bot) that connects to each bot in the swarm. Any bot can act as a repeater, relaying instructions to bots that can't talk to the leader directly.

Robot swarms are not a new idea: they've been floating around as concepts for many years. However, [McLurkin] was one of the first to actually build and program a large swarm (at one time he held the record for the largest robot swarm in the world). The idea caught on with researchers and today there's even an open source robot swarm project. If you're not up to building a whole bunch of robots, there are also simulators.
After the demo, we asked [McLurkin] about the cost of the robots. He said he didn't know for sure, but estimated at least $2000 per bot. When we commented that "that's a lot of money for 100 bots", he pointed out that compared to the $20K+ that research robots can go for, it's a bargain. He also said "This whole new world of hobby robotics just didn't exist in the 90's". For robots to be deployed in swarms of hundreds or even thousands, in situations where they can get damaged or lost (search and rescue, military exercises) the cost will need to drop dramatically.

Here he is packing up his robot swarm. After the demo, we half expected them to pack themselves - no, they don't.

For more info on robot swarms, their inspiration and possible uses take a look at [McLurkin]'s web site.

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Source: Chris Kiick

Filed under: robots hacks

The nitty gritty details are a little bit hidden, but [Sylvain]'s work is awesome enough that I just don't care. He's been doing research on robot learning with some tasty results. After all, who doesn't want a robot to make breakfast for em? He's taken the time to publish some source code, so robot made breakfast isn't that far out of reach. mmmm.

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Source: Will O'Brien

Filed under: robots hacks

SWARM is a large scale kinetic art project. The electrically powered spheres move by shifting the batteries around the center axle. By tilting the central ring, th orb can steer as well. The SWARM members are currently radio controlled, but the plan is for them to eventually receive commands from a mother node. More information about the orbs' design is available on the project wiki. A video of the wobbly buggers in motion is embedded after the break.

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Source: Eliot Phillips

Filed under: misc hacks, robots hacks

[gim] gutted some li-ion laptop batteries to replace his roomba's battery pack. He had to pick up a li-ion charger and add a protection circuit to deal with the li-ion cells, but ended up with a new lighter pack for his roomba. If you head this way, the protection circuit is a vital component to prevent fires/explisions/etc. Looks like a great resource for robot power or even R/C projects.

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Source: Will O'Brien

Filed under: playstation hacks, robots hacks

This is an older set of hacks, but I'm surprised we haven't covered them before. The playstation controller is an interesting alternative to normal robotic controls. This PS1 controller to serial interface is based on a Motorola HC68 series micro-controller. This even simpler version only needs some diodes to interface with a parallel port. Probably more interesting is this how-to on using a wireless PS2 controller with a basic stamp II.

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Source: Will O'Brien

Filed under: robots hacks

[Andrew] sent in this sweet snake robot video. The snake bots are all about 36 inches long and built from lots of hitech servos and 6061 aluminum. The guys/gals at Carnegie Mellon have built quite a few of these, and I'd say that their work is paying off. They haven't published much in the way of details, but it appears that the snakes are being computer controlled for faster behavioral development than an on-board mictrocontroller would allow. When I saw the snake motion I was reminded of the winner of the latest Tresser robotics contest - Phoenix. It's a spider like bot based on servos, but with some very impressive motion programming that was designed with an excel spreadsheet.

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Source: Will O'Brien

Filed under: robots hacks

Here's a good rule of thumb: "Don't update your firmware five minutes before you're going to fly an autonomous robot ten feet away from a former Vice President of the United States."
One of the afterthoughts of [Chris Anderson] after presenting his Arduino controlled blimp at TED. (I might have to squeeze TED into my con schedule next year.) The project itself is somewhat documented here, with some hi-res photos, parts list, and some firmware. Apparently the blimp was overcome by the A/C in the auditorium, but I still dig it.

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Source: Will O'Brien

Filed under: robots hacks

[nophead] put this creation down to its final resting place, but it still deserves some attention. A Motorola MC6809 ran the show while a stepper driven robotic arm tipped with a suction cup fetched the selected disc. [nophead] has an interesting blog covering his work on building a 3d prototyping machine. The goal is to use it to produce a reprap, but he does a nice job of covering design problems and his attempts to solve them.

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Source: Will O'Brien