Collaborate Disseminate
Bobble-Bot uses the standard inverted pendulum problem to teach modern robotic control using a Raspberry Pi, RT-Linux, and ROS.
We’re really impressed by the polish and design effort put into this project, and it’s no surprise that it’s a finalist in the 2019 Hackaday Prize. Bobble-Bot is a top heavy …read more
Continue reading Bobble-Bot Teaches Modern Real-Time Robot Control
Microsoft is announcing an improved Visual Studio Code extension and some new Azure-based solutions that will enable improved robotics development in Windows.
The post Microsoft Announces Expanded Support for Robotics Development in Windows appeared f… Continue reading Microsoft Announces Expanded Support for Robotics Development in Windows
Robotics is hard, maybe not quite as difficult as astrophysics or understanding human relationships, but designing a competition winning bot from scratch was never going to be easy. Ok, so [Paul Bupe, Jr’s] robot, named ‘Goose’, did not quite win the competition, but we’re very interested to learn what golden …read more
Continue reading Designing An Advanced Autonomous Robot: Goose
Harvesting delicate fruit and vegetables with robots is hard, and increasingly us humans no longer want to do these jobs. The pressure to find engineering solutions is intense and more and more machines of different shapes and sizes have recently been emerging in an attempt to alleviate the problem. Additionally, …read more
Continue reading Robot Harvesting Machine Is Tip Of The Agri-Tech Iceberg
A simple robot that performs line-following or obstacle avoidance can fit all of its logic inside a single Arduino sketch. But as a robot’s autonomy increases, its corresponding software gets complicated very quickly. It won’t be long before diagnostic monitoring and logging comes in handy, or the desire to encapsulate …read more
Continue reading Dashing Diademata Delivers Second Generation ROS
Reinforcement learning is a subset of machine learning where the machine is scored on their performance (“evaluation function”). Over the course of a training session, behavior that improved final score is positively reinforced gradually building towards an optimal solution. [Dheera Venkatraman] thought it would be fun to use reinforcement learning …read more
Sensors are critical in robotics. A robot relies on its sensor package to perform its programmed duties. If sensors are damaged or non-functional, the robot can perform unpredictably, or even fail entirely. [Dheera Venkatraman] has been working to make debugging sensor issues easier with the rosshow package for Robot Operating …read more
Continue reading ROS Gets Quick Sensor Debugging In The Terminal
Putting autonomous vehicles on public roads takes major resources beyond most of our means. But we can explore all the same general concepts at a smaller scale by modifying remote-control toy cars, limited only by our individual budgets and skill levels. For those of us whose interest and expertise lie in software, Amazon Web Services just launched AWS DeepRacer: a complete package for exploring machine learning on autonomous vehicles.
At a hardware level, the spec sheet makes it sound like they’ve bolted their AWS DeepLens machine vision computer on an 1/18th scale monster truck chassis. But the hardware is only …read more
Continue reading Buy Or Build An Autonomous Race Car To Take The Checkered Flag
Microsoft is bringing ROS to Window 10. ROS stands for Robot Operating System, a software framework and large collection of libraries for developing robots which we recently wrote an introductory article about, It’s long been primarily supported under Linux and Mac OS X, and even then, best under Ubuntu. My own efforts to get it working under the Raspbian distribution on the Raspberry Pi led me to instead download a Pi Ubuntu image. So having it running with the support of Microsoft on Windows will add some welcome variety.
To announce it to the world, they had a small booth …read more
Continue reading Is 2018 Finally the Year of Windows on the Robot?
We don’t have to tell you that drones are all the rage. But while new commercial models are being released all the time, and new parts get released for the makers, the basic technology used in the hardware hasn’t changed in the last few years. Sure, we’ve added more sensors, increased computing power, and improved the efficiency, but the key developments come in the software: you only have to look at the latest models on the market, or the frequency of Git commits to Betaflight, Butterflight, Cleanflight, etc.
With this in mind, for a Hackaday prize entry [int-smart] is working …read more
Continue reading Simple Quadcopter Testbed Clears The Air For Easy Algorithm Development