Soft robotics is a challenging field, because it comes with all of the difficulties associated with conventional robotics and adds in the complexity of designing non-rigid bodies. That isn’t a trivial thing, as most CAD software doesn’t have the ability to simulate the flexibility of the material. You also have to understand how the actuators will perform. That’s why a team of researchers from Zhejiang University and Carnegie Mellon University developed MiuraKit, which is a modular construction kit for pneumatic robots.
MiuraKit isn’t any one robot, but rather a set of tools and designs that can be combined to build robots and shape-changing interfaces. Anything made with MiuraKit will have a few things in common: pneumatic actuation, flexibility, and origami-like structures. Those structures expand or deform in a variety of different ways to suit the application. For example, one type is a simple one-dimensional expander similar to a linear actuator. Another type twists for rotary actuation. By linking different types together, roboticists can achieve complex motion.
Because these structures rely on pneumatic actuation, they need valves to control airflow. MiuraKit works with electromagnetic valves under the control of an Arduino board. That receives commands from a computer over a serial connection, but it can also work on its own with pre-programmed instructions. MiruaKit includes almost everything needed to create a robot: 3D-printable pneumatic connectors, a CAD design tool, laser cutter templates, and the pump with control system. In the coming weeks, the designers plan to give MiuraKit out to design firms and schools for evaluation.
Building walking robots is difficult, because they either need a lot of legs or some ability to balance through their gait. There is a reason that the robots designed by companies like Boston Dynamics are so impressive. But lots of hobbyists have made bipedal and quadrupedal robots, while largely ignoring tripedal robots. To find out if they could be practical, James Bruton created a prototype tripedal robot.
When compared to a bipedal robot, a tripedal robot is more stable when standing still. But a bipedal robot is more stable when walking. That’s because it can keep its center of gravity almost directly above the foot that contacts the ground. A tripedal robot, on the other hand, needs to attempt to balance on two legs while move the third, while the center of gravity is somewhere above the middle of a triangle formed by the three feet. That makes walking gaits difficult to achieve.
Bruton built this prototype using a 3D-printed body, legs actuated by servo motors, and an Arduino Mega 2560 for control. The three legs are arranged with radial symmetry and each leg has three joints. Bruton attempted to give the robot a gait in which it tries to momentarily balance on two legs, while lifting and swinging the third around.
But that was very inefficient and clumsy. Bruton believes that he could achieve better results by equipping the robot with an IMU. That would give it a sense of balance, which could help it remain steady on two legs through a gait. With a counterbalancing weight, that could make a big difference. But for now, Bruton is putting this experiment on the back burner.
There are many ways to control a robot arm, with the simplest being a sequential list of rotation commands for the motors. But that method is very inefficient when the robot needs to do anything complex in the real world. A more streamlined technique lets the user move the arm as necessary, which sets a “recording” of the movements that the robot can then repeat. We tend to see that in high-end robots, but Mr Innovative built a robot arm with recording capability using very affordable materials.
This uses an input controller that is roughly the same size and shape as the robot arm, so Mr Innovative can manipulate that controller and the arm will mimic the movements like a puppet. The robot arm will also record those movements so it can repeat them later without any direct oversight. The video shows this in action with a demonstration in which the robot picks up small cylindrical objects and places them at the top of chute, where they slide back down for the process to continue indefinitely.
An Arduino Nano board powers the servo motors through a custom driver board to actuate the robot arm. It takes input from the controller, which has rotary potentiometers in the joints where the robot arm has servo motors. Therefore, the values from the potentiometers match the desired angles of the servo motors. The custom driver board has two buttons: one to activate the gripper and one to record to movements. When Mr Innovative holds down the second button, the Arduino will store all the movement commands so that it can repeat them.
Many people find the subjectivity of art to be frustrating, but that subjectivity is what makes art interesting. Banksy’s self-shredding art piece is a great example of this. The original painting sold at auction for $1.4 million—and then it shredded itself in front of everyone. That increased its value and the now-shredded piece, dubbed “Love Is in the Bin,” sold again at auction in 2021 for a record-breaking $23 million. In a similar vein to that infamous work, this robot destroys the artwork that it produces.
“The Whimsy Artist” is a small robot rover, like the kind you’d get in an educational STEM kit. It is the type of robot that most people start with, because it is very simple. It only needs two DC motors to drive around and it can detect obstacles using an ultrasonic distance sensor and has two infrared sensors for line-following. An Arduino Uno Rev3 board controls the operation of the two motors according to the information it receives from the sensors.
That decision-making is where the artistic elements come into play. When it doesn’t detect any obstacles, the robot will run in “creative” mode. It opens a chute on a dispenser to drop a trail of fine sand while it moves in a pleasant spiral pattern. But if it sees an obstacle with the ultrasonic sensor, it gets angry. In that mode, it reverses direction and uses the IR sensors to follow the line it just created while deploying a brush to destroy its own sandy artwork.
While it is easier now than ever before, getting into robotics is still daunting. In the past, aspiring roboticists were limited by budget and inaccessible technology. But today the challenge is an overwhelming abundance of different options. It is hard to know where to start, which is why Saul designed a set of easy-to-build and affordable robots called Bolt Bots.
There are currently five different Bolt Bot versions to suit different applications and you can assemble all of them with the same set of hardware. Once you finish one, you can repurpose the components to make another. The current designs include a large four-leg walker (V1), a tiny four-leg walker (V2), a robot arm (V3), a car (V4), and a hanging plotter that can draw (V5). They all have a shared designed language and utilize 3D-printed mechanical parts with off-the-shelf fasteners.
Every robot has an Arduino Micro board paired with an nRF24L01 radio transceiver module for control. Users can take advantage of existing RC transmitters or build a remote also designed by Saul. The other components include servo motors, an 18650 lithium battery, and miscellaneous parts likes wires and screws. Some of the Bolt Bots require different servo motors, like continuous-rotation and mini 1.8g models, but most of them are standard 9g hobby servo motors.
Because there are five Bolt Bot variations that use the same components, this is an awesome ecosystem for getting started in robotics on a budget — especially for kids and teens.
Getting started in the world of robotics can be a very challenging task, even for more experienced hobbyists, due to how difficult it can be to achieve smooth and precise motion through programming. Frustrated by the lack of accessible options, the YouTuber known as “Build Some Stuff” decided to not only design his own, but to do it using as few prefabricated parts as possible and while keeping the total cost under $60.
The premise of the arm project was to utilize a total of five servo motors for manipulating each degree of freedom, as well as an Arduino Leonardo and a PCA9685 driver for controlling them. Once the components had been selected, Build Some Stuff then moved onto the next step of creating 3D models of each of the robot arm’s joints in Fusion 360 before 3D printing them. He also made a scaled-down version of the larger arm assembly and replaced the servo motors with potentiometers, therefore allowing him to translate the model’s position into degrees for the motors.
Although simple, the code running on the Leonardo was still responsive enough to move the servos in nearly perfect synchronization compared to the model. To see more about how Build Some Stuff was able to make this robotic system from scratch and some of the problems he ran into, watch the video below!
James Bruton has become something of a YouTube sensation by experimenting with unusual drive mechanisms for his robots. While he does do other things, most of his projects seem to focus on designing, building, and evaluating drive types that are far outside of the norm. His newest project is no different. It is a single-track tank vehicle that steers itself by bending its entire body.
Bruton got this idea after looking at the way conveyor belts work. Those belts, which tend to be a series of interconnected segments, are obviously flexible along their length, which is necessary for them to bend and loop back around. But they are also slightly flexible in the direction perpendicular to that, which is necessary for the conveyor belt to make a turn. Bruton figured that if he could make a tank track bend in a similar way, he could make the vehicle turn without the need for a second track.
To test this idea, Burton 3D-printed almost the entirety of the vehicle. That includes the track itself, which is made of several rigid segments that link together. There is just enough movement in the connections to allow a segment to sit at an angle relative to its neighbors. Conventional motors in front and back units spin the track, and an Arduino Mega 2560 board controls them. Between the two units is a joint that pivots horizontally. A linear actuator arm controls the angle between the front and back units, forcing the track to bend.
While the turning radius is massive, this vehicle can maneuver. It isn’t very good at clearing obstacles, but that is more due to Bruton’s design than the drive and steering system. That could be improved with additional design iterations, but this vehicle already proves that the concept works.
While brainstorming gift ideas, Professor Boots settled upon creating a tiny present-delivering robot that could move around on its own power. Because WALL-E’s design already has a built-in compartment and is quite memorable, it became the jumping off point for the project. The entire robot is 3D-printed from a combination of rigid PLA for the housing and flexible TPU for the tracks.
The lowest portion of the compartment houses two geared DC motors that each control a track independently. They are driven by an H-bridge chip which is, in turn, controlled by an Arduino Nano. A total of five servo motors were used to adjust the positions of the head, arms, and the front compartment. A small speaker and amplifier circuit was added so that the classic “WALL-E” sound effect could be played, and finally, an HM-10 Bluetooth® module was connected via UART for communication with a smartphone.
The mobile app, called Dabble, gives the user a virtual Bluetooth® controller and allows them to push buttons to make the robot drive, open the compartment, and even perform some predefined movement sequences, although the RC mode can be switched to autonomous via a small button at the front.
To see more about how this pint-sized WALL-E-Inspired robot was made, watch Professor Boots’ video below.
Who said robots had to be all work and no play? For many years, people have been designing and building robots not just to help with chores, but to help us win games. Possibly the most famous examples of this are the robots that play chess.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the history of chess-playing robots, how they’ve evolved over time, and share three famous examples.
And do not forget that with the right inspiration, Arduino, and the Arduino Cloud, creating a robot is not a dream anymore!
The history of robots in chess — Three famous robotic chess prodigies
Chess is an old game. Humans have been playing it for 1,400 years, and for the vast majority of that time, their only opponents were other humans.
As time went on and technology became more advanced, people started to turn their thoughts to ways of using tech to win at chess. One of the first (somewhat clumsy) attempts came in the 18th century.
The Turk
The Mechanical Turk, developed in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen, stunned audiences by repeatedly holding its own against human opponents. The world had changed forever — were machines finally beginning to outsmart their makers!?
Well… not exactly. The Turk actually turned out to be a case of fraud — and featured a human chess player hiding inside the machine and controlling its movements. False alarm.
The Mechanical Turk was destroyed by fire in 1854, after a perplexingly long career.
Boris Handroid
Throughout the 20th century, people worked furiously to build machines that could beat humans at chess. Progress slowly chugged along, and in 1980 the first commercially available chess robot came into being.
It was based on a chess computer called Boris and was extremely rare and limited, to the point where many people doubted it even existed. Due to its incredibly exclusive nature, it’s no surprise that the Handroid never became a household name.
The Milton Bradley Computers
Although the Handroid was not exactly a success story, it did show the world that there was at least an appetite for chess-playing robots, if they could be made effectively and at scale.
In the early 1980s, American board game giant Milton Bradley decided to take on the challenge. Working with computer scientists, they began to develop a robotic chess game that would move the pieces reliably enough to be sold at a mass scale.
The result was actually three different models: the Grandmaster that hit the US market, the Milton which was sold in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, and the Phantom which was built for the British market — although all three devices were extremely similar.
The Milton Bradley chessboard was able to detect where pieces were and used magnets attached to motor-driven belts to pull the pieces around the board. Unlike most of its predecessors, the Milton Bradley chess robot was a success and sold many copies in the US and Europe.
For chess aficionados, an important moment had arrived — you could now play chess at home without the need for a human opponent.
Deep Blue
Although it’s more of a computer program than a robot per se, no article about chess-playing robots would be complete without a mention of Deep Blue. Built on an IBM supercomputer, Deep Blue was the culmination of many years of grueling research and programming — a computer that could finally challenge a human chess champion.
In a series of games over the course of 1996 and 1997 — 10 years after development began on the project at Carnegie Mellon University — Deep Blue beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.
It was a groundbreaking moment not just for chess, but for humanity as a whole — a reminder that, as advanced and intelligent as we are, the machines might just be catching us up.
Build your own chess robots
Today, you don’t need to rely on astronomically expensive novelty gadgets to experience the wonders of chess-playing robots — you can easily make your own at home. With tools like Arduino, amateur tech enthusiasts can assemble chess-playing machines for relatively low cost and without the need for a highly specialized skillset.
The Arduino Project Hub is home to a ton of chess-related projects, including some robots. YouTuber RobotAvatar built this machine that uses 64 reed switches to direct an Arduino Uno where each chess piece is.
Meanwhile, a computer running a Python program takes care of the “thinking” and sends signals to the device to move pieces. It’s a pretty straightforward device that literally adds an extra dimension to the game of computerized chess — allowing you to play games against machines in a much more tangible way.
Another amazing project, created by Greg06 on Instructables, is the automated chessboard that can not only tell where specific pieces are moved but also play against an actual opponent while moving its own pieces.
Chess isn’t the only thing Arduino is capable of. Check out our homepage to learn more about how it all works, the kinds of projects you can build, and how you can get started.
For some students, getting decent grades or even finding the motivation to attempt to do schoolwork is a challenge, and this is often met with incentives such as money, praise, or simply avoiding embarrassment. Adam Soileau of element14 Presents had the idea to build a robot, which is an incentive unto itself by playing music, launching confetti, and waving one of those inflatable car dealership arm-waving tube things when grades cross a predetermined threshold.
The first challenge Soileau was met with involved determining the best way to launch confetti. Due to the prevalence of party poppers, or mini confetti cannons, he chose to use a high-torque servo motor that could pull the string back. The audio portion of the project relies on reading music data from an SD card, outputting it via a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), and then amplifying the sound using an LM386 op-amp for the speaker. Finally, the wacky waving inflatable tube-man is placed onto the fan in order to inflate it, while waving is done by toggling the fan on or off quickly with a MOSFET. An Arduino MKR Zero was employed to control each component due to its DAC and SD card capabilities.
Perhaps the most important aspect, retrieving grade data was done by harnessing Canvas’s web API through which assignment, quiz, and test grades can be programmatically accessed. Once collected, this data was then processed and stored in a CSV file so new grades could be compared to older ones. After an ‘A’ has been spotted, the system activates and rewards the student with the aforementioned confetti, music, and dancing. Detailed information about this project can be found here and seen in Soileau’s video below.
Strangely, no centipede has exactly 100 legs. They can have either more or fewer than 100 legs, but not exactly 100 because they always have an odd number of pairs. Sadly, that means that James Bruton’s centipede robot is anatomically incorrect — though cool nonetheless.
Bruton built this centipede robot as a scaled-down prototype, as he plans to construct a ridable version sometime in the future. This robot, which is still quite large, let him test the unusual walking mechanisms. The robot has five segments, each of which contains two pairs of legs. The mathematicians among you will have deduced that that equals 20 individual legs. But the legs don’t operate independently. In fact, all 20 of those legs are connected mechanically. Each segment has a drive shaft that moves its legs through gears and linkages, and universal joints connect the drive shafts between segments.
That mechanical setup means that the centipede can be driven by a single DC motor. An Arduino Mega 2560 board controls that and the two servo motors used for steering. Those servos pull on elastic cords connecting the first two segments. When one cord tightens, it forces the first segment to pivot to that side (relative to the second segment). The other segments then follow naturally, letting the robot turn. All of the mechanical parts were 3D-printed and Bruton can pilot the robot using his universal remote control.
Unfortunately, this robot’s innovative leg mechanisms didn’t work very well. The feet had a tendency to slide backwards, causing huge efficiency losses. That means that Bruton will have to come up with another leg design before he can scale the robot up to a full-size ridable version.
Firefighting is a dangerous profession, but it is possible to mitigate some of that danger with good data. When firefighters entered a burning building, their biggest fear is the unknown. They don’t know if they can trust the structural integrity of the building, if there is a pocket of toxic or explosive gas, or how to navigate the interior to find casualties. As part of a project called HelpResponder, a team of researchers from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid created a robot that can enter a building to gather the data firefighters need to do their job safely.
This robot, which is a mid-sized rover, can operate via manual control or in an autonomous mode. In both cases, its job is to explore buildings, either during a fire or after a disaster, to map the interior and find hazards. Its camera system allows for visual detection, but it also has a host of integrated sensors for detecting elevated temperatures, gas pockets, and more. With that information, firefighters can then enter the building and rescue anyone trapped inside while avoiding hazardous areas or bringing the equipment necessary to deal with them.
Control and monitoring happens on two levels. At the high level, a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer records video, handles mapping operations, and coordinates autonomous navigation. At the low level, an Arduino UNO WiFi Rev.2 collects incoming sensor data and controls the motor driver. The onboard sensors include a temperature/humidity sensor, an air quality sensor, and ultrasonic sensors for navigation. Thanks to a modular design, additional hardware can be added to fit specific scenarios.
While the majority of makers are unable to afford the fancy equipment and components that go into modern state-of-the-art battle robots, there do exist lesser-known tournaments for more DIY designs, including sumo robot battles. Instructables user noclaf8810373’s design incorporates all of the high-powered components one would expect to find, along with an innovative defense mechanism.
Construction of the robot began by 3D printing nearly everything from ABS filament due to its strength and resistance to high temperatures, whereas nylon was used in the gear. Once cleaned up, a series of strong magnets were set into both the front blade and undercarriage to assist in preventing the robot from flipping over due to an opposing robot. Internally, a pair of motors drive the wheels through several gears for increased torque, and they are both controlled by an Arduino Micro. In this case, the microcontroller’s role is to take incoming data from the radio transmitter, convert it into commands, and set the motors accordingly.
After assembling the electronic components, including the Arduino, motor drivers, and large capacitors onto a piece of perfboard, they were securely fastened inside the robot’s interior compartment. To see more about the build process, you can check out the project’s write-up here on Instructables.
Sometimes you get a hankering for a snack, but there is no snack within arm’s reach. Such a situation is a tragedy and exactly what we built society and technology to avoid. To prevent this frankly appalling possibility, Michael Rigsby made Snacky, which is a snack-dispensing system that lets Amazon Astro robots deliver snacks to peckish people.
The Amazon Astro is a robot designed for helping around the home. It is a bit like an Amazon Echo on wheels, which extends Alexa’s abilities to the physical world. By default, it doesn’t do much except drive around to look at stuff — something that has potential for applications like security and teleconferencing. But because Astro utilizes Alexa, it can take advantage of developer and user-created Skills. In theory, that will make Astro very useful as accessories and abilities become available. Rigsby is leading that charge with Snacky.
Snacky is essentially a vending machine dispenser attached to the Astro robot’s charging dock. At Rigsby’s spoken request, Astro will drive over to the dock, park, wait as snacks drop into its storage bin, and then drive over to him to deliver a treat. The custom Skill tells Astro to head over to its dock, and then the Snacky hardware handles the rest.
That hardware includes an Arduino Uno board, an Arduino Motor Shield, two infrared sensor modules, a continuous rotation servo motor, and a DC power supply. The mechanical parts are a combination of wood and custom 3D-printed pieces. The Arduino detects the presence of Astro using the infrared sensors, then rotates the servo motor to spin the dispenser coil long enough to eject some nibbles.
If you frequent driving ranges, you’ve probably seen a machine (often attached to the front of an armored golf cart) designed to pick up golf balls. Because a driving range can easily fill up with thousands of golf balls an hour, such machines are necessary. After noticing that nobody wanted to pick up the ping pong balls after matches, Maxime Monsieur and his team (Oumaima Achkif, Reda El Marsse, and Amir Farbod) built this robot that collects ping pong balls using a mechanism similar to those used for golf balls.
Like a golf ball collecting machine, this robot picks up golf balls using a spinning mechanism that resembles something you’d see on an agricultural harvester. Any ping pong balls in front of the robot get pushed towards that mechanism by a pair of spring-loaded arms. The rotating mechanism then pushes the ping pong balls up a ramp and into a bin. The robot navigates through the room like an old robot vacuum: by driving forward until it meets a wall, then turning in a random direction.
The team constructed the robot’s frame and body using a combination of laser-cut MDF and 3D-printed plastic parts. It has two stepper motors that spin the two drive wheels, and a DC motor that spins the collection mechanism. An ultrasonic sensor detects walls and other obstacles. An Arduino Uno board controls the two stepper motors via A4988 driver boards and turns the DC motor on via a relay module.
In tests, this robot seems to work quite well, even though its navigation is inefficient. No word on if nearby players attempt to pelt the robot with ping pong balls as it works.
If you look at footage from the search and rescue efforts following any disaster, you’ll see that first responders have a very difficult time navigating through rubble to find people in need of emergency care. They also have to take extra precautions, as gas line ruptures and other hazards present dangers they don’t normally face. To assist in those efforts, Ranit Bhowmick and his team built the SARDA (Search and Rescue Deployable Assistant) robot that can create 3D maps of disaster areas.
SARDA is currently an early prototype and its capabilities are limited, but the idea is sound. It is a little wheeled robot that would (in theory, at least) rove around a disaster area while mapping its surroundings. It could work autonomously or an operator could guide it manually. While moving around an area, it would generate a 3D map of rigid objects, like walls and obstacles, and also health hazards like clouds of smoke, heat, or toxic gases. A computer at a control station would use that data to produce a digital 3D render of the environment that first responders could reference during their search and rescue efforts.
The robot is affordable to build and uses only off-the-shelf components. Those include an Arduino Nano board, a pair of ultrasonic distance sensors, a temperature and humidity sensor, and a smoke sensor. The Arduino controls the drive motors through L239D drivers. The RCU (receiver and controller unit) contains an Arduino Uno and communicates with SARDA through a pair of nRF24L01 radio transceiver modules.
Bhowmick and team created SARDA for a science fair and it is rudimentary, but functional. The mapping software can only generate simple blocks where the ultrasonic sensors detect obstacles and the positioning is based purely on open-feedback motor control. But this is a great start and something to build upon.
As part of what has become an annual holiday tradition, several YouTube makers coordinated their efforts this year for a Secret Santa exchange. Returning participant James Bruton drew Emily the Engineer and found inspiration for his gift from an automatic boxing glove that she built. Taking that idea and running with it, he created a pair of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots that can drive around and compete in real-life bouts.
The two 3D-printed robots, which are obviously red and blue, roam around on two driven wheels and punch with massive fists. That fists attach magnetically to automatic reciprocating punching mechanisms very similar to the one Emily the Engineer designed. If one robot pilot is able to punch the fist off of the opposing robot, they win the round. To kick off another round, all the players have to do is snap the fist back onto the magnetic mount.
Arduino Nano boards control both robots as well as both RC transmitters, for a total of four Arduino boards. Bruton paired each Arduino with an nRF24L01 radio transceiver module, which facilitates the communication between the robots and their RC transmitters. Each robot has three DC motors: two for the drive wheels and one for the reciprocating punching mechanism. The onboard Arduino controls the motors through IBT-4 motor drivers. Finally, the transmitters contain joysticks for moving the robots and triggers for activating the punching mechanism.
Now Emily the Engineer can duke it out on a grand scale whenever she wants, throwing punches via a mechanism that she devised.
Infineon is one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers, but the company is made up of regular people like any other. Many of those people just happen to be engineers and they like to build gadgets and gizmos like the rest of us. Following a water cooler discussion about who had the biggest 3D printer, the Infineon team decided to create this delightful XXL Chatbot to offer yuletide greetings.
The adorable robot was designed after the Infineon Chatbot avatar that offers virtual assistance on the Infineon website. While that internet Chatbot can respond to natural language questions, this XXL Chatbot can only emote through its animated eyes and chest-mounted RGB LED matrix. The team 3D-printed the robot’s body in several sections on a Creality Ender-5 Plus and the assembled figure is quite large, hence the “XXL” designation.
They animated the eyes using two custom PCBs, each of which has a diameter of 60mm and contains 101 SK6812MINI individually addressable RGB LEDs. They controlled those with a pair of Infineon XMC2GO microcontroller development boards. The chest display is a flexible 64×32 RGB LED matrix from Adafruit, which conforms to the cylindrical curve of the robot’s torso. They controlled that LED matrix with an Arduino Mega 2560 board through Adafruit’s RGB Matrix Shield. It displays a Christmas tree animation derived from z1co’s animation set for 32×32 matrices.
The result is a cheerful and adorable robot that fits perfectly with the holiday season!
Revolutionary new technologies tend to require small, incremental developments. For example, physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent for a transistor way back in 1925. But it wasn’t possible to actually build transistors until semiconductor production caught up in 1947 — something that took decades of “boring” materials research. Such research may seem trivial, but often turns out to be important to the bigger picture. That is likely the case with this burrowing mole crab robot, called EMBUR, built by UC Berkeley engineers.
This Arduino Due-controlled robot can burrow into loose substrates like a mole crab in sand. In the wild, mole crabs can bury their bodies in sand within a few seconds. That is surprisingly hard to replicate, as wriggling robots tend to just push themselves up on top of the sand. The key to this robot’s burrowing ability is a special set of flexible legs. The Arduino spins motors that rotate a reciprocating mechanism to actuate legs covered in fabric. When the legs push forward into the substrate, the fabric folds to decrease resistance. Then when the legs move back, the fabric unfurls and creates resistance for propulsion.
It may seem like a novelty, but this practical development actually has wide-ranging and important applications. Robots that can burrow through the ground have many uses, from subterranean data collection to space exploration. Asteroids, for instance, are often made of loose gravel-like rock held together by gravity. If a robot could dig its way through such asteroids, it could analyze the composition and determine if the material is suitable for mining. Here on Earth, a burrowing robot would be useful in agriculture, construction, and many scientific fields.
The new Andor TV show, set in the Star Wars universe prior to the events of Rogue One, is already a hit and a big part of that is thanks to the B2EMO droid. Like many of the other droids in the Star Wars franchise, B2EMO manages to be very expressive despite being cold, hard steel. It conveys emotions and expressions through complex movement, which James Bruton recreated when he built his B2EMO-inspired droid.
B2EMO looks like a conventional rover robot, but it is quite flexible. It can drive in any direction thanks to its omnidirectional wheels and also tilts, leans, and stretches, which makes it seem more like a beloved pet than a soulless robot. The Andor production team actually built a functional B2EMO for filming. Bruton put his own unique spin on the design to create a B2EMO replica that is affordable enough for a hobbyist to tackle.
An Arduino Mega 2560 board controls all of the robotâs motors and servos. It receives commands through an nRF24L01 radio transceiver module with signals coming from Brutonâs universal robot remote. Most of the robotâs structure is a combination of aluminum extrusion and 3D-printed parts. Four omniwheels driven by DC motors let it move in any direction, while several servo-actuated joints (and even an interesting rack-and-pinion linear expansion system) impart the complex movement. With those, it can lean in any direction and also expand its own wheel base.
As it stands, this robot moves like B2EMO but doesnât look much like it. In follow-up videos, Bruton plans to work on the aesthetics and will hopefully end up with something very similar to the onscreen Andor droid.
Valorant is a free-to-play 5v5 first-person shooter game. As in most shooters, players want to avoid getting shot. One way they can prevent incoming fire is to use Boom Bot, which is a little robot that will drive forward and chase enemies before exploding — while the player stays safely hidden out of sight. While he probably won’t be getting into any gunfights, Danny Lum built his own functional replica of the Boom Bot.
Boom Bot’s behavior in the game is quite simple. When deployed, it will drive straight forward until it either collides with a wall or detects an opponent. If it runs into a wall, it turns like a Roomba. If it sees a target, it will begin chasing them. Lum was able to recreate that functionality in a conventional two-wheel-drive rover robot. The robot was designed in Solidworks CAD to match in the in-game Boom Bot and then 3D-printed.
An Arduino Nano board controls the two drive motors that rotate special irregular wheels to give the robot wobbly movement like in the game. It also responds to information from two sets of sensors. A trio of ultrasonic sensors handle obstacle detection and tell the robot which way to rotate. An OpenMV face detection camera finds humans so the Boom Bot replica can chase them. An LCD screen gives Boom Bot an emotive face and a servo-actuated hatch on top pops open during targeting.
The final touch was a pneumatic powder puffer system that replaces the in-game explosion.
James Bruton gave that title to his most recent video as a good-natured jab at Allen Pan’s project about “giving snakes there legs back.” In Pan’s video, he built a robotic exoskeleton to let snakes walk around on motorized legs. But as Bruton noted in his video intro, those legs didn’t look very snakelike. So Bruton created his own robot that walks around on more serpentine limbs.
This robot’s six limbs each have three degrees of freedom (DoF), all of which are motor-driven. But unlike most robotic limb designs, these use “oblique swivel joint mechanisms.” That mouthful of a term means that each joint rotates on a plane offset at an angle relative to the preceding joint. While that arrangement isn’t suitable for many applications, the kinematics are interesting and the resulting movement does resemble the wriggling of a snake’s body as it slithers along.
Beefy servo motors rotate the joints and an Arduino Mega 2560 board controls them. The servos don’t allow for continuous rotation, but that wasn’t necessary for this robot’s gait. Power comes from a hobby LiPo battery pack and Bruton pilots the robot using the custom universal remote that makes an appearance in most of his videos. All of the leg segments were 3D-printed and attached to a frame made from a couple pieces of aluminum extrusion.
While it is easy for the Arduino to control the position of each servo motor, Bruton had to do a lot of work to figure out how to coordinate their movement. He figured out the basics through trial-and-error, but sophisticated control would require trigonometry and the implementation of inverse kinematics. Bruton decided not to bother with those, since he had already accomplished his goal of building robotic legs that look like they would belong to a snake.
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