Stephen Hobley is at it again.  His laser harp was cool enough to win second place in our project contest a few months back, and since then he’s managed to make it even cooler.  Using a Wiimote to accurately track the positions at which the beams are interrupted, he added some very clean and precise pitch control to the already impressive instrument.  Watch the video.  After about a minute of demonstration, he gives a quick explanation of how the modification works, so be sure to watch the whole video.

He started a thread about this in our forums, so head on over there to give him props, ask questions, etc:
Laser Harp Mk III

If you haven’t read the original thread from when he first completed the project, check it out here:
Frameless Laser Harp

If you want more info on how it was made, or if you want to build your own, follow this link to Stephens’s site:
The Laboratory

We’ve had some very cool multi-legged walkers showing up in our forums and blog in the past few months, including Kåre Halvorsen’s Phoenix and Matt Denton’s B.F.Hexapod, and we’ve been really impressed by the varying capabilities and gait calculation methods they’ve used.  Taking it to the next level, the builders have decided that they’re not content with just making their robots walk about and wave their legs around any more.  In February, Phoenix learned a new trick:

Then Denton gave it a shot with his B.F.Hexapod, showing off some impressive drawing skills:

If you want to see more info, or to drill these guys for more information on their projects, hit up the forums.  Kåre’s thread; Matt’s thread.

Gepetto, one of the runners up in our last contest, got some airtime on G4 TV’s "Attack of the Show" this past Tuesday!  This bot has been generating quite a bit of buzz, which isn’t surprising.  It has style, good mechanical design, brains, and high-caliber weaponry.  Also, people just can’t resist videos of a robot attacking its creator (TR community member darkback2).  In the video, Gepetto is featured along with Plen and the CMU snake robot.

Congratulations!

Linkage:
AotS Blog post
Video

We don’t want to take too much credit here, but let’s not forget where we first saw Gepetto.  Right here, in the Trossen Robotics Community.  Booyah.

In case you’re new to the Trossen Robotics Community, here’s a quick refresher on how this contest works:  First, all kinds of fantastically talented and dedicated people come to our Project Showcase forum to tell us all about the projects they’ve been working on.  Periodically, we (the Trossen Robotics team) sort through these projects, and score them very scientifically in the following categories: "Wow" factor, Ingenuity, creativity, and presentation (this includes graphics, videos, documentation, explanation, etc.).  This is the fourth contest we’ve run here at Trossen Robotics, and the projects just keep getting cooler!  This time around, we extended the deadline and upped the stakes.  Since the last contest, the community has grown and expanded well beyond our expectations, and this has resulted in some of the best work we’ve seen yet.  If you showed off your project in our Project Showcase forum, give yourself a big ol’ pat on the back.  Now, let’s get to the meat and potatoes.  Here are the runners-up and winners, in suspense-building ascending order!

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Honorable Mention

Project: "Johnny 5.3"

Creator: Andrew Alter (Tyberius)

We’ve been working a little too closely with Andrew to let him enter the contest, but we can’t totally leave him hanging.  He’s been building a "Johnny 5"-inspired humanoid/trackbot hybrid, and it’s really coming together.  His brain (Johnny’s, not Andrew’s) is a Pico-ITX running Windows XP Pro.  It has a vocal synthesizer, great big grippers, a reinforced suspension system, a snarky personality, and I’ve heard that it drives around harassing Andrew’s baby.  It’s the embodiment of robotic awesomeness, in other words.  Check out his thread, picture gallery, and his blog.

Runners-Up

Project: "Leviskate"

Creator: Rodger Cleye
Average Score: 7.63 / 10
Prize: $20 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

The Leviskate is a "self-balancing motorboard."  Kind of like a Segway for people who really like head injuries.  Seriously though, this contraption is truly awesome.  There are some cool videos in Rodger’s thread, too.  Our favorite thing about the videos is that Rodger sounds genuinely amazed that it actually works.

Project: "The Bratinator Project"

Creator: SN96
Average Score: 7.67 / 10
Prize: $20 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

It walks, it talks, it scares the kids.  It’s… the Bratinator.  Built around the Lynxmotion Brat biped, this monstrosity features speech, binaural hearing, a custom-machined aluminum head.

Project: "Gepetto"

Creator: darkback2
Average Score: 8.25 / 10
Prize: $20 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

It really pains us to see Gepetto in the runners up, instead of placing in a cash-winning position, but sometimes that’s just the way it goes.  This was a very close race.  This bot is beautifully made from wood and metal, has a really cool suspension system, carries its laptop brain around with it, and is programmed with some really interesting behavior/mood software.  That’s really just the tip of the iceberg, so you’ll have to read through the thread to see Gepetto’s full story.

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Third Place

Project: "eyeRobot"
Creator: Nathaniel Barshay
Average Score: 8.38 / 10
Prize: $100 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

The eyeRobot is a robotic guide for people with vision impairments.  It has a whole slew of IR and ultrasonic range sensors for collision avoidance, and pathfinding software to keep it moving through the clearest area.  This was a proof-of-concept prototype meant to "marry the simplicity of the traditional white cane with the instincts of a seeing-eye dog."  This project is going places, and hopefully one day it will help other people go places.

Second Place

Project: "Frameless Laser Harp"
Creator: Stephen Hobley
Average Score: 8.88 / 10
Prize: $250 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

Twenty-two years ago, he saw Jean-Michel Jarre play a laser harp at a concert, and from that day he’s been on a mission.  This mission finally came to fruition last month, when he completed his own laser harp, and let me tell you, it’s a pretty stunning piece of equipment.  Using a galvanometer to very rapidly and precisely aim a pulsing laser, light sensors to detect where a beam has been interrupted, and an Arduino brain; the harp sends MIDI control signals to a synthesizer.

First Place

Project: "Phoenix"
Creator: KÃ¥re Halvorsen
Average Score: 9.63 / 10
Prize: $500 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

Phoenix is a six legged walking robot.  Wait, we know some of you out there may be thinking that hexapod robots are old hat.  Well, you’re wrong.  So very wrong.  Wait until you see it move.  Phoenix’s real beauty lies in her graceful motion, which is some of the most convincing and eerily lifelike that we’ve seen in a robot that uses standard hobby servos and a common off-the-shelf servo controller.  The kinematics are computed by an intricately programmed spreadsheet, which we highly recommend you check out if you’re a fan of trigonometry.

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We want to thank everyone for their great submissions.  If all goes as planned, the next contest (which is already underway) will conclude at the end of May 2008.  You can stay up to date on contest rules and regulations at the Trossen Robotics Project Contest page, and start posting your projects in our Project Showcase Forum.

I spent the first half of the week checking out cool products at CES then I come home and find the forums full of even cooler projects by creative roboticists. It’s almost enough to make one forget we are all going to die a violent death during oil shortage wars in the next few decades… anyway, time for a forum dump of all the awesomeness that people are up to these days.

Shineling is working on his interactive AI teddy bear:

Watching the disembodied jaw talking is either funny or eerie, I can’t decide.

Here it is a little less disturbing as a bear reporter reporting on bear stories. Cute.

SN96 posts his bad ass humanoid with custom mechanoskull head and Metallica soundtrack. The bot is missing one arm, but somehow this adds to it’s coolness factor. As if it was ripped off in battle and he doesn’t have time to worry about it because he was created to kill and that’s what he aims to do. Check out the post to see all the specs and watch another video of it watching movement and talking.

Tyberius is a robot building madman. He has been posting tons of pics and vids of his incredible project which is a Pico-ITX based Johnny 5. Here are just two vids, visit the thread to see a lot more stuff.

Pico Johnny 5 says, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. How about you go find your own Fu@$#%g chair.”

As if building Pico Johnny 5 isn’t enough… Tyberius is also working on a
cute teeny tiny quadropod.

“Please don’t step on me!”

Rodger Cleye has decided to one up the Segway by creating the Leviskate. A ONE wheeled riding device. I’m not sure how you can best this other than creating the hover board from Return to the Future…

Eski posted his Autonomous Foosball Table which was a senior project. I don’t recall school being this cool. I think for our senior project we were given a battery, an LED, some wire,
Dixie cup, and a balloon then told to create something interesting. We didn’t
have as much technology back then.

Don’t forget that we run a contest for cool projects like these. The current contest is running until leap year day, Feb 29th. If you’ve made something cool, brag about it here. More info about the Submit Your Project and Win contest can be found here.

The Automated Foosball Table was created by a group of senior engineering students at Georgia Tech.  This project was mentioned briefly on Hack a Day last week, but we think it deserves a closer look, so here it is.  This is both a really fun project (Seriously, who doesn’t love a good game of foosball?) and an interesting experiment in human/machine interaction.  It doesn’t look like it could beat a human foosball master (so we won’t have a scene like when Garry Kasparov wept openly and cursed out Deep Blue after it beat him at chess), but the potential is there.

Four human-controlled rows, four robotic ones. At the right, you can see the custom PIC-based servo controller board.  Let’s take a closer look at the drive mechanisms:

Recognize that actuator?  That’s a Robotis AX-12 Dynamixel.  It’s the cornerstone of the wildly popular Bioloid system, and it’s one of our favorite robot servos on the market.  These actuators can be set to servo mode or continuous rotation mode.  In CR mode, you can get accurate positional feedback.  What you end up with is functionally the same as a highly accurate, powerful, serially controlled stepping motor; at a fraction of the cost.

Here’s the whole rig.  As you can see you have the table, a camera watching the table, a computer processing the video feed and sending commands to the actuator controller board, and actuators pulling and twisting the handles.

The team wrote their tracking software, which tracks the ball and maneuvers the players accordingly, in Java.  Matlab was considered, but the plan was scrapped because Matlab is too resource-hungry.

The custom actuator control board is pretty cool.  Two different types of outputs for the two styles of servos.  The kicking motion is handled by standard PWM hobby servos, while the lateral motion is handled by AX-12 Dynamixels.

Project home page
Found via Hack a Day

All images belong to the design team.  They were clipped from the project’s final report document or captured from the video.

Another contest, another batch of cool projects!  Once again, the TR Community came through with some great ideas.  As per usual, the Trossen Robotics staff scored projects from our "Project Showcase" forum on a scale of 0-5 for documentation, coolness, ingenuity, and creativity.  This is only a sampling of what’s been posted in the Project forum, and there are still some great projects that unfortunately didn’t make the cut.  I wish we could give awards and salutations to all of them, but we can’t, so when you’re finished reading this, go check out the rest of the projects in the Project Showcase forum.  And now, here are the finalists of the "Submit Your Project And Win" contest!

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Runners Up:

Project: Wiimote Firefighting Robot
Creator: tempalte
Prize: 10% off next TR order

This bot detects fire using the IR camera in the Wiimote and talks to a computer via Bluetooth.  Very cool.

Project: Skype Controlled Roboquad with Spy Capability
Creator: roschler
Prize: 10% off next TR order

Roboquad + wireless cam + Robodance + USB UIRT + Skype = Awesome.

Project: Distributed Autonomous Swarm of Maxelbots
Creator: uwdrl
Prize: 10% off next TR order

Ultrasonic swarm localization and heavy metal.

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Third Place
Project: Halloween Hologram / Spirited Tree R/C Holiday Double Whammy
Creator: Rodger Cleye
Prize: $50 TR Gift Cirtificate

If you don’t know what the hell’s going on in the above picture, you’re not alone.  Rodger submitted the "Holographic Halloween Robot" in October, then repurposed the hardware and resubmitted it in November as the "Spirited Tree."  Both were highly entertaining and totally ridiculous.  The base is a modified electric wheelchair drive system.  The hologram illusion was created with an LCD and an angled piece of plexiglass.  The LCD can display video broadcast live from an IR camera or a DVD player. With Halloween receding into the past and Christmas looming on the horizon, Rodger replaced the hologram rig with a music playing light-up Christmas tree.  Rodger is a newcomer to our forums, but if you’ve been reading Hack a Day and other DIY news outlets for a while, you’ve probably already seen his self-balancing electric unicycle and electric skateboard.

Second Place
Project: Front Door RFID Security
Creator: fish123456
Prize: $100 TR Gift Cirtificate

This guy hacked into his electronic deadbolt, adding a Phidget RFID reader so he could unlock his front door with an RFID key fob.  This has been done a few times before, but we decided we needed to reward "fish123456" for going the extra mile, because in addition to RFID, he also created a web interface that he can access from his cell phone.  This has a lot of potential.  For instance, if somebody needs to get into your house when you’re not home, you can unlock it remotely for them.  Or if your RFID chip is implanted in your hand, and that hand gets bitten off by a shark; you don’t need to hunt down the shark and wave it in front of the door to open it!

First Place
Project: Otto
Creator: kdwyer
Prize: $200 TR Gift Cirtificate

Otto is a humanoid/track hybrid droid with an incredible range of capabilities.  Kdwyer's mission was to make an autonomous robot that could avoid obstacles, track motion, and interact with people through speech and gestures.  Otto's brain follows a distributed architecture, employing 2 Oopic R's (the "upper" and "lower" brains).  He boasts a boatload of sensors, such as IR rangefinders, Ultrasonic rangefinders, a digital compass, and a color video camera.  We like this project a lot, mostly because it was built from the ground up using a pile of hardware from numerous different sources.

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Thanks to everyone for your submissions.  The next contest is rolling as we speak.  As always, we’re looking forward to seeing what else you can come up with!  You can stay up to date on contest rules and regulations at the Submit Your Project and Win contest page, and start posting your projects in our Project Showcase Forum.

Ok, this is just too damn cool. The Surveyor crew have integrated the SRV-1 controller with a quad-rotor helicopter.

The heli, called "X-3D-BL Scientific," is from a German company called Ascending Technologies GmbH.  I knew it was easy to use the SRV-1 controller for other wheeled vehicles, but seeing it on a UAV is pretty exciting.  They don’t have too much info up yet, but it sounds promising.  Here’s a video of the aircraft (without SRV-1 controller) in action:

Check out the original post, and keep an eye on the Surveyor Robotics Journal for updates!

The November Submit Your Project Contest for cool robots, flamethrowers, automatic cat herders, talking furniture, or what ever else you may have built is still on. If you’ve built something cool and techy we want to see it and so does everyone else in our community of tinkering inventors. One of the cooler projects posted recently came from none other than master robot tinkering man Robert Oschler of www.robotsrule.com.

Robert made a remote internet voice controlled Roboquad using Skype, robodance, and a UIRT. This is some creative stuff here folks. People who think that futuristic robots must cost a zillion dollars are proven wrong by Roberts ingenuity.

Robert has created this awesome video showing how he built his project letting you know how to do it too.

Do you have a cool project you want to show off? Post it in our contest forum and win. Contest runs every month. Right now the prizes are $200 for first place, $100 for second, and $50 for third.

Waterhobo: A backyard defense system

Teenagers keep cutting through your yard without asking? Here is a solution for you. The Waterhobo, a motion triggered water cannon with a webcam to capture the offenders.

From Site “I have met a bunch of my goals in prototype 1, I can shoot about 30 feet and can cover a field of fire of about 30 feet. I can also control the movement of the barrel by a servo and a Phidget device. In this version in the top bunker “Window” I have a web camera mounted to the barrel and it shows the video of what it sees as the barrel moves. I control this all via a web page that was written in C# and using ASP 2.0 with a little bit of Ajax thrown in. But as I have said before media player force me to version 2.”

Discuss Tim’s project here.