Collaborate Disseminate
One thing going slightly viral lately is footage of Disney’s “HoloTile” infinite floor, an experimental sort of 360° treadmill developed by [Lanny Smoot]. But how exactly does it work? Details …read more Continue reading Here’s How That Disney 360° Treadmill Works
When we run an article with “DOOM” in the title, it’s typically another example of getting the venerable game running on some minimalist platform. This DOOM-based VR rig for rats, …read more Continue reading Rats Learn to Play DOOM in This Automated VR Arena
A lot of great scientific breakthroughs come through imitating nature, but technology often runs up against limits in certain areas. This is particularly evident in robotics, where it takes a lot of effort (and cost) to build a robot which can effectively manipulate heavy objects but not crush others which …read more
Putting a 3D printer on a mobile robotic platform is one thing, but two robots co-cooperatively printing a large object together is even more impressive. AMBOTS posted the video on Twitter and we’ve embedded it below.
The robots sport omnidirectional wheels and SCARA format arms, and appear to interact with …read more
Continue reading Watch These Two Robots Cooperate On a 3D Print
[Klaus Halbach] gets his name attached to these clever arrangements of permanent magnets but the effect was discovered by [John C. Mallinson]. Mallinson array sounds good too, but what’s in a name? A Halbach array consists of permanent magnets with their poles rotated relative to each other. Depending on how they’re rotated, you can create some useful patterns in the overall magnetic field.
Over at the K&J Magnetics blog, they dig into the effects and power of these arrays in the linear form and the circular form. The Halbach effect may not be a common topic over dinner, but the …read more
A traditional quadcopter is designed to achieve 6 degrees of freedom — three translational and three rotational — and piloting these manually can prove to be a challenge for beginners. Hexacopters offer better stability and flight speed at a higher price but the flight controller gets a bit more complex.
Taking this to a whole new level, the teams at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) and Zurich University of the Arts (ZHDK) have come together to present a hexacopter with 6 individually tiltable axes. The 360-degree tilt in rotors allows for a whopping 12-degrees of freedom in …read more
Continue reading Harrier-like Tilt Thrust in Multirotor Aircraft
Some scrap wood, a few pieces of sheet metal, a quartet of old gear motors, and a few basic hand tools. That’s all it takes to build an omni-bot with Mecanum wheels, if you’ve got a little know-how too.
For the uninitiated, Mecanum wheels can rotate in any direction thanks to a series of tapered rollers around the circumference that are canted 45° relative to the main axle. [Navin Khambhala]’s approach to Mecanum wheel construction is decidedly low tech and very labor intensive, but results in working wheels and a pretty agile bot. The supports for the rollers are cut …read more
Continue reading Scrap Wood and Metal Combined for DIY Mecanum Wheels
Watching robots doing sports is pretty impressive from a technical viewpoint, although we secretly smile when we compare these robots’ humble attempts to our own motoric skills. Now, a new robot named Robomintoner seeks to challenge human players, and it’s already darn good at badminton.
This is not the first time we see a racquet attached to an omnidirectional motion platform or a racquet attached to a linear motion gantry, but it’s the first time we see this special combination of both. The clever design allows the robot to move autonomously over the entire playing field on its omnidirectional wheels, …read more
Continue reading Robomintoner Badminton Bot To Defeat Amateur Humans