[Petar and Sylvain] are teaching this robot to flip pancakes. It starts with some kinesthetic learning; a human operator moves the robot arm to flip a pancake while the robot records the motion. Next, motion tracking is used so that the robot can improve during its learning process. It eventually gets the hang of it, as you can see after the break, but we wonder how this will work with real batter. This is a simulated pancake so the weight and amount at of force necessary to unstick it from the pan is always the same. Still, we loved the robotic pizza maker and if they get this to work it’ll earn a special place in our hearts.

[Thanks Ferdinand via Flabber]

[theGrue] has posted his Robot remote control project for us to gawk at. This box o’ buttons is a parallax propeller brain with some Xbee units for communication. Though it was designed to work with TOBI, his tool carrying robot, he made it so that he could control a multitude of robots with it by flipping some switches on the front of the remote. [via Hacked Gadgets]

[Lucky Larry] posted some pictures to the Hack a Day flickr pool that caught our eye. He made a quick and cheap servo driven arm. Constructed from foam board and some hobby servos, he’s using an Arduino for the brains. You can download the pattern for the arm pieces as well as the code on his site. He ultimately finds that he has positioning issues that he blames on the cheap servos. You can see in the video on his site that the circles it is drawing are drifting one direction.

We came across a couple of videos of this toddler android. It sits up, rolls over, and responds to humans around it using visual, audio, and sensor inputs. After the break you will see that the movements are quite like that of a young child. The giveaway is the weight of the robot which is evident when its handlers trying to help it get untangled from that blanket. It seems to respond to individuals around with a smile and a twinkle of its… errr… camera eye. We wonder if it would find delight in knocking down some dominoes. Body movements

Facial response

Though it is in the beginning stages of development, the Distributed Flight Array is already looking very interesting. Each unit can scuttle across the ground using the down force from its prop, but when 4 or more join forces, they can take off and fly. The documentation shows that they should be smart enough to fly in random configurations, though in the video we only see the standard 4 prop layout. This is being worked on by the same people who produced the balancing cube. [via BoingBoing]

Culture Shock II, a robot by the Lawrence Tech team, first caught our eye due to it’s unique drive train. Upon further investigation we found a very well built robot with a ton of unique features. The first thing we noticed about CultureShockII are the giant 36″ wheels. The wheel assemblies are actually unicycles modified to be driven by the geared motors on the bottom. The reason such large wheels were chosen was to keep the center of gravity well below the axle, providing a very self stabilizing robot. The robot also has two casters with a suspension system to act as dampers and stabilizers in the case of shocks and inclines. Pictured Below.

The next thing we noticed were the strange semi-circles mounted above the casters. Upon further inquiry we found that the robot uses 10 lasers to project cross-hairs on the ground so that it can use its stereo vision at night.

The robot has two stereo vision cameras from Videre, a brand that has been very popular at this year’s IGVC. The cameras overlap and provide the AI with a pixel-associated 3d point map. The team also came up with a clever way to adjust the camera to different lighting situations with two “candy canes” sticking out into the robot’s field of vision. The robot can look at these and use an algorithm to adjust the colors according. This helps greatly with white line detection. (The robots must stay within two white lines painted about 10 feet apart on the grass.)

Along with the stereo vision the robot also features an Omnistar-VBS enabled gps capable of sub meter accuracy and a digital compass. Aside from the driver software for the cameras, the robot is written completely in Java. The AI uses frame-by-frame mapping. Each frame the robot sets an objective out in the distance and moves towards it. In the next frame the robot checks to see if that objective is still reachable and moves towards it, otherwise it changes its path. To get around objects the robot hugs the obstacle until it is behind it. The system is a hybrid of mapping and reactive AI. The robot’s brain is a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad running 32bit windows. It has a solid state drive and 4GB of ram. One cool thing to note is that all of the sensors and micro-controllers run off the ATX power supply for the computer. Instead of using an inverter they found a suitable 12V ATX supply.

The rear control panel is pretty neat too. It has a touch screen, switches for all the main components, and status LEDs. Below it you can see the very back of the computer, hosed in a shuttle style thermaltake case.

If you take the panel on the front off you are greeted with a view of the robot’s power and signal distribution. The green board is a Roboteq AX3500 which runs the motors and manages the PID feedback. The robot has 70lbs of sealed lead acid batteries in its base which allows it to run for approximately two hours. The remote E-stop (required by the rules) for this robot is actually a remote garage door opener hacked into turning the robot on and off. We’ll finish with a shot of happy* engineers working away on their robots.

*depending on the state of their robot Day One Report

The Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) is the precursor to the DARPA Grand Challenge, and in many ways it is just as difficult. We have the pleasure of being at the competition this year with the Tennessee Technological University Autonomous Robotics Team. The teams at the competition pull off some amazing home-brew robotics, so we’ve decided to do a short section on some exemplary robotic hacking each day of the competition. Today’s robot comes from the York College of Pennsylvania. The robot, dubbed “Green Lightning”, features an impressive set of custom made hardware.

We interviewed the team, and got a pretty thorough rundown of their robot with pictures after the jump. The spinal cord of the robot is this custom built beauty.

It consists of six layers, each with a specific function. The boards were designed by the team and fabricated by Sunstone Circuits.  Each layer except for the top has it’s own teensy++ unit, programmed in C, providing an SPI interface to the hardware it’s designed to connect to. The first layer has an Arduino Mega programmed in C on it. The layers communicate with the Mega through an SPI bus running at 500Kbaud. The Mega processes the information and then communicates to a computer through a 1Mbaud usb serial connection. The remaining five layers are each designed to interface with a specific section of the robot’s hardware. The second layer communicates with a Wheel Commander from Nubotics, simplifying the robot’s motion controls.The third layer  is the interface to the robot’s emergency stop. The rules require that there be a visible hardware e-stop on the back of the robot and a wireless remote e-stop. They solved their wireless e-stop problem with a zig-bee module that connects to the robot through this layer.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth layers all connect to the robot’s sensor groups. The fourth layer is the interface to their gps, mounted at the top of the robot. Most gps units communicate with simple serial and it’s pretty elegant that they managed to save a usb port by adding a board. The robot has nine Sharp 2Y0A710 distance sensors acting as a short-range bumper for obstacle avoidance which all connect to the fifth layer. The final layer is the interface for 10 long range sonar sensors located at compass points around the robot. The robot also has two USB Web Cams for line and object detection mounted on the mast.  The AI and computer side hardware interface is programmed in a mix of C and Java. The AI follows a reactive model instead of a mapping/planning one which has been proven to be very effective in this competition for many teams. The frame, track, and drive train were custom built by the team as well.

Here you can see the back of the robot where the drive train, Wheel Commander, and two SaberTooth motor drivers are.

A side shot shows their track system. They modeled it in SolidWorks first and then fabricated everything including the belt in house. In the end the robot cost them around $5,200 after discounts which is pretty impressive considering it’s capabilities and that some of the robots at this competition easily break $50,000 dollars. It’s a prime example of what good engineering and home-brew magic can accomplish. We’ll finish with a shot of their manual control system.

Turn your volume down and take a look at the brick sorting robot in the video above. It’s built using LEGO and powered by four different NXT modules. It sorts differently colored bricks on the intake conveyor and places them on three output conveyors. The build is solid and was [Chris Shepherd's] impetus for starting a blog. We appreciate the pneumatic tricks that he detailed in some of his earlier posts such as a compressor, pressure switch, and air tank system. His advice is “build, build, build” and that’s what you’d have to do to perfect a monster of this size and scope.

Mr. Stabby was once a broken down bum, sitting on the curb, waiting for an eternity in the city dump. Luckily, someone found him and brought him to the NYC Resistor hacker group. They promptly performed some modifications and brought him back to life. He’s now a happy go lucky stab-bot with a twinkle in his eye and a skip in his step. His repitoir includes gouging, slashing, and of course stabbing. He can be controlled via a cell phone and has a nifty voice interface. The video above is from when Mr. Stabby was runner up at the tech crunch hackday.

At first, watching this video of MABEL, a bipedal robot for studying dynamic gaits, we didn’t know if we should be scared or feel sad. By the end, we know that sadness prevailed. Poor MABEL, forced into a  grueling routine, is not even allowed to rest when her leg breaks. To be serious though, MABEL is quite impressive. Instead of using a direct drive on the legs, motors are attached to springs that act like tendons. This helps compensate for variances in the walking surface, hopefully allowing for smoother transitions between gaits as well. As you can see, MABEL handles the height differences quite well, albeit a bit slowly. It is worth noting that there are no visual sensors on MABEL and everything is done through feedback from her gait.

[Daqq's] latest creation is this little robot with a CRT mounted on the front. Obviously ‘why?’ is the wrong question here, but we know this is right up his alley considering his propensity for the less common like this plasma ball Nixie tube. The solidly-built bot uses two stepper motor controlled wheels and an omni-wheel on the front to create a trike. An ATmega128 controls the system but the real story here is the CRT. It requires a hefty voltage regulator for the -600V to +200V the Tungsram DG7-123 tube needs. Trouble along the way ranged from dealing with stray magnetic fields from the power supply, to mounting the fragile tube itself. Take a look at his detailed writeup linked above and join us after the break for the demo videos.

You may remember seeing the golf glove air guitar hack last month. Here’s two more uses for gloves with sensors on them. On the left is a glove interface with flex sensors on each digit as well as an accelerometer. The VEX module reads the sensors to detect sign language as a command set. A shake of the hand is picked up by an accelerometer to delineate between different command sets. See it controlling a little robot after the break. This comes from [Amnon Demri] who was also involved in the EMG prosthesis. Straight out of Cornell we have the SudoGlove, seen on the right. [Jeremy Blum] and his fellow engineering students bring together a mess of different sensors, sourcing an Arduino and a XBee module to control a small RC car with added lights and a siren. There’s embedded video after the break. You may want to jump past the music video for the description that starts at about 3:52.

Sign language glove interface

SudoGlove interface

If a picture is worth 1000 words, by our count, [Ryan Commbes] has said 1.68×10^6 different things about his custom robot, airsoft, and monster truck builds. While we’re not ones to pick favorites, we agreed his Alpine TPG-1 (picture at the top) build is a step above the rest. Sadly, the forums with his build log doesn’t seem to be loading, but he says the basic process if you wanted to make your own is to gather pictures, measure, and create. [Thanks Andrew]

Ah, the heady aroma of damp engineers! It’s raining in Silicon Valley, where the 2010 Embedded Systems Conference is getting off the ground at San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center. ESC is primarily an industry event. In the past there’s been some lighter fare such as Parallax, Inc. representing the hobbyist market and giant robot giraffes walking the expo. With the economy now turned sour, the show floor lately is just a bit smaller and the focus more businesslike. Still, nestled between components intended to sell by the millions and oscilloscopes costing more than some cars, one can still find a few nifty technology products well within the budget of most Hack a Day readers, along with a few good classic hacks and tech demos…

(Is that a promise or a threat?) First order of business was to follow up on a couple of products we’ve covered in the recent past… We reviewed NXP’s mbed prototyping platform in November of last year. While there’s no stunning new revision, the good news is that the mbed community is going strong and economies of scale have made it possible to trim the starter kit price from $99 back down to the original early adopter cost of $59.

Additionally, they’ve thrown together a project in just a few days to demonstrate the prototyping ease of the mbed platform. Reading like a checklist of Hack a Day clichés, the demo brings together Twitter, the Logo programming language, live web streaming, servos and an Etch-a-Sketch. You can read more on the mbed blog, or watch the live stream and participate during ESC show hours.

We also liked this little breakout board which adds the most essential interfaces to mbed: MicroSD, Ethernet and USB host & client. This was something quickly made for an mbed workshop, and while there are no plans to officially productize it, we’re told the unpopulated board might be available through SparkFun’s BatchPCB service in the future. Many readers were put off by the web-centric development approach used by mbed, as well as the lack of a debugger. Another NXP entry-level evaluation product called the LPCXpresso provides an affordable ARM development kit from a more traditional angle.

The $30 LPCXpresso boards are available in Cortex-M0 or -M3 varieties and include an integrated JTAG debugger. The downloadable Windows development environment is based around the Eclipse IDE and GNU toolchain. With headers installed the LPCXpresso is breadboard-friendly and in fact shares the same pinout as mbed, so there’s an existing ecosystem of hardware to work from. STMicroelectronics’ STM8S-Discovery made a huge impact when we mentioned this $7 kit in November, clearing out distributors in a matter of days. At ESC, ST was showing their new ultra-low-power 8- and 32-bit MCUs with demos powered by a cactus (a variation on the classic lemon battery), a cup of warm water sitting atop a Peltier junction, and a modest induction charger. (What, no wind power?)

A new version on the STM8S-Discovery based on the new lower-power chip should be available within a couple of months, and is expected to be similarly affordable. (Left: the original STM8S kit that created the ruckus. Right: the forthcoming STM8L kit.) At the Texas Instruments booth, the BeagleBoard XM was being demonstrated, which improves upon its predecessor in nearly every regard.

We’re told BeagleBoard XM stands for “extra MIPS,” “extra memory,” (and “extra money,” they joked). The XM does not replace the original BeagleBoard, but will be sold alongside it at a premium price of $179 when it ships in June. The XM includes a faster processor (1 GHz), more RAM (512 MB, and a 1GB model may be forthcoming), Ethernet, more USB ports and improved power protection. The NAND flash is gone, replaced by a MicroSD slot on the underside. The new board is slightly larger but retains the same mounting holes, so it may fit as an upgrade into some existing BeagleBoard projects. Microchip’s iPod/iPhone accessory development boards that we mentioned last month were on display. Unfortunately it appears one must be signed on with Apple’s “Made for iPod” developer program before these kits can even be ordered from Microchip, which really puts a damper on the fun for anyone who might just want to tinker.

Drifting further from product specifics and more into hacks and eye candy… Product teardowns have become a staple of tech culture. “Zero-day” and live blog teardowns of new products are particularly exciting. ESC’s gone one better, making a show of ripping into a product (if a rather esoteric one) months before its official release: a high-end Zircon AC wire detector built around a Microchip dsPIC and a bevy of e-field sensors. It’s like engineer pr0n!

National Instruments certainly had one of the most entertaining booths at the event. Rather than passively showing dry PowerPoint summaries and monitors running LabVIEW (their graphical programming environment for engineers and scientists), they instead presented physical demos and projects making use of the software. Some serious, others not-so-serious. Hacks!

Remember Waterloo Labs’ iPhone-controlled car hack? There it is! Rather, there it is minus the actual car, but with all the essential parts nicely laid out where we can observe the rig in action. At the other end of the booth, one can challenge “RockBot” to a round of Frets on Fire, not unlike prior hacks we’ve seen.

Hack a Day readers might be familiar with Digi International for their XBee wireless modules, such as used in Adafruit’s Tweet-a-Watt power monitor. Easily distracted by shiny things, we were initially smitten with this addressable LED matrix wrapped around their booth; not a product, just something to catch peoples’ interest:

As it turns out, there’s an added bonus hack behind the hack. Most of Digi’s booth displays could be controlled and monitored using their own custom web apps, so it was a simple matter of walking around with an iPod touch to run the show:

At the ARM pavilion, this “Speedcuber” was solving Rubik’s cubes in under half a minute. The camera and puzzle-solving logic comes from a Motorola Droid. Commands are issued over Bluetooth to a pair of LEGO Mindstorms NXT controllers to drive the motors that manipulate the cube.

Macraigor Systems produces a line of JTAG debuggers…but to be honest, we (and pretty much everyone else passing the booth) nearly missed that fact, as we were all so distracted by their demo application involving one spectacular and elegant Intel hexapod robot:

We similarly fanboyed over Cryptography Research’s German Enigma cipher machine, as it was our first time seeing one not under lock and key in a glass museum case:

ESC Silicon Valley runs through Thursday, April 29th, and last we checked one could still register for a free exhibits-only pass on the ESC web site.

If you’ve had the opportunity to attend the annual Bay Area Maker Faire, you’ve likely encountered Russell the Electric Giraffe. Modeled after a small Tamiya walking toy scaled up to the height of an actual giraffe, Russell was created by [Lindsay Lawlor] in 2005 originally as an “art car” providing a better vantage point from which to enjoy the Burning Man arts festival. In the intervening five years, the Electric Giraffe has enjoyed face time in dozens of parades, trade shows, magazines and television appearances. Scattered about [Lawlor’s] living room floor at the moment are the giraffe’s dismantled steel skull and several massive Torxis servos (the red boxes in the photo above) — Russell is being upgraded. One of [Lawlor’s] goals in returning to Maker Faire each year is that he not simply present the same exhibit time and time again; the robot is continually evolving. Initially it was little more than a framework and drivetrain, and had to be steered by bodily shoving the entire 1,700 pound beast. Improvements to the steering and power train followed, along with a “skin” of hundreds of addressable LEDs, cosmetic improvements such as a new paint job, and technological upgrades like interactivity, radio control and speech. His goal this year is to bring expressive animatronic movement to the giraffe’s head and jaw, hence the servos, push rods and custom-machined bits currently strewn through his living space-cum-laboratory.

[Lawlor], 46, is a lifelong “maker,” with a gamut of talents from electronics to optics to mechanical engineering. Aside from creating this giant walking machine, he restores motorcycles, installs high-rise fire safety systems and has built his own laser light show projectors. And perhaps surprisingly, he’s managed all this without a degree or other formal education, just an intense curiosity and unstoppable drive. We posed to him one of the most common questions we receive at Ask HackADay, as to how one can get started in electronics and building the sorts of creative projects regularly featured on Hack a Day: Don’t be afraid of failure, it’s a crucial part of the learning process. Get your hands dirty and start building projects that interest you — build a model airplane, restore a motorcycle. By tearing it apart and putting it back together, you learn to see what makes it tick. Someone who’s brave enough or sometimes lucky enough to acquire the means to build something, they end up with a vast amount of practical knowledge about what they’re interested in. Textbooks alone can’t provide that. Seek a lot of advice from people who’ve worked on this stuff before. Respect them by following through…don’t just talk about your grand plans. Go to Burning Man or Maker Faire or hang out with artistic people. This will bring crazy ideas to the forefront. The amount of influence you receive from showing up at a place like that is incredible. It’s unstoppable, a really powerful force.

Maker Faire is just a few weeks away. [Lindz] ponders the explosion of parts on his workbench and floor, uneasy about the looming deadline. Can he pull it off and complete these upgrades in time? We’re firming up plans to attend the show and hope to provide our readers with updates of all the various displays, including Russell and — fingers crossed — his new face.

This somewhat frightening armature is the base for the iconic energizer bunny. While we love seeing the guts of popular robotics, this brings up an interesting fact. In Europe, the bunny is the symbol for Duracell. There’s an interesting story where Duracell had used the bunny for years in europe, only to inspire Energizer to copy them stateside in 1989. This one will be available on ebay shortly. Catch a Duracell battery after the break

What weighs 120 pounds, can fly at you near 20mph, score soccer balls, climb 90inch tall towers and more all while remotely controlled? If you said a robot from this years FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, competition congrats you’ve won one internet. This past Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (March 25-27 respectively) the Oklahoma FIRST regional competition took place. Once again I, HaD writer [Jakob] was lucky enough to not only attend, but compete! Check out our full breakdown after the jump. Readers may remember some time back when we explained he OKBEST competition, and noticed it had striking similarities to the FIRST competition. While the build time is only 6 weeks for both competitions, that is where the similarities end. We would love to give a rehash and an explanation of differences, but readers might like to simply read and compare for themselves between BEST and FIRST and realize they are completely different games.

This years goal for FIRST, is in short, a soccer game. A field with 6 robots (1 robot per team), three blue, three red, battle it out head to head; blocking, scoring, and more to be the winner of the round. The addition of not knowing your two other teammates until the day of the match, and the inclusion of small ‘hill’s and ‘climbs’ increase the difficulty of the competition. Those looking for a full explanation of the rules and game type can find it here.

Team captain once again played the role to allow me to bring you this overview. Unlike previous robotic competitions, this was the first time our team, 3124, attended FIRST — making us rookies.

Our team’s design, if put into one word would be simple. The initial aluminum frame was constructed on kickoff day from our kit of parts. After that, to keep the soccer ball out from under the robot – we wrapped a (donated supply) wooden skirt around the perimeter of the bot. A pneumatic (donated, yet later not used, we broke too many rules with it) kicker was implemented. After having traction issues – a custom spring suspension system (perhaps the most complicated portion of our robot, two springs and a bolt) kept all 4 wheels securely on the ground.

While we were rookies, had very little funding, only two/three active members, and even more disadvantages we still managed to come out on top. By ranking 5th (out of 54 other teams) in the seeding rounds, we attended semi finals after asking teams 932 and 2842 to join us, and ended up 3rd overall; giving us the award for Highest Rookie Seed. Anyone wishing to watch some (or all) of the matches and learn how teams ranked up should check BotsnLinux.net.

First definitely is a unique experience, and I’m glad I was able to attend. Honestly, we didn’t expect to reach nearly as high as we did in rankings. But thus teaching, you don’t have to have tons of money, or a complicated system, or a large team, or the best design to win. The adventure of course taught us much more than that in the end as well. Hopefully values and ideas that can be taken and used in future endeavors for years and years to come.

Here’s a collection of little LEGO oddities. Some of them exhibit a purpose, such as this interesting take on a line-following robot. Others, like the four seen above, are just automatons built to bring a smile to your face through their motion. There are dozens to choose from, with several pictures and a video of each. See the clips of these four after the break. Oh, and don’t worry, we didn’t find any LEGO iPhone docks, just cleaver mobile creations.

[Thanks Richard and Juan]

One of our most prolific commenters, [mrgoogfan], shared with us his working BattleBots style robot. Built for under $500, it is capable of zipping around at 25 miles an hour under load. Chances are, this robot would be just as much fun as a Bar Stool Racer as it is with all the weapons attached. The bill of materials also includes a good number of links as well as prices to get the blossoming roboteers in the audience started. We cant wait for the microcontroller automated version, because the idea of a big angry killer Roomba is just the kind of thing that makes us happy. Oh, and we might have a couple suggestions for weapon packages… Check out the video after the break to see [mrgoogfan] zipping around on the top of his robot and showing off the weapons systems. Have any of you built your own BattleBot or similar platform? We would love to hear from anyone willing to show off a cheaper, faster, smarter, or stronger build, or any tips for people looking to get started in building their own.

Who needs expensive acrylic based, microcontrolled robots with only a few sensors available when cardboard and an Android cellphone will work much better  for much less in cost! The team over at Cellbots have done just that. While they did cheat a little by using a laser cut cardboard for exact measurements and including an Arduino to control the servos, they certainly attained their goal of “cheap” (assuming the already had the cellphone). We’re just wondering why it took them 4 weeks for a little CAD and code. Regardless, one idea that immediately comes to mind is thousands hundreds a few little cardboard swarm bots ravaging homes everywhere, just don’t step on them. [Thanks Mashable]