I got some news for ya’. Lots of it too:

• Robots Process DNA Crime Kits
• High School Robotics Day sponsored by Robodoyssey and Central Jersey Robotics Group.
• Robocup Junior - "…robots must be able to detect the infra-red-emitting ball and dribble it into a goal without being stopped by an opponent."
  "[F]inals will be held on August 5-6 at the University of Tasmania". Official Site.
• University of California, San Diego Does Robot Research with Toddlers – The robots are, "immersed for about an hour at a time in the ordinary activities of the 10- to 24-month old children."
  "Next targets for [the robot] … include being able to point, hold the children’s hands and hug [the kids] back." More succent versions here and here.
• Japanese Guardbot-San!  The robot pictured is shown putting out fires, not patrolling empty shopping malls … perhaps a goof?
• Robots Replace Newscamera Operators. Will we notice?

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This is a little how-to guide on crimping connectors for various electronics projects. The art of crimping is sometimes a difficult one, but necessary for 1) reliable and 2) decent looking connections. Breadboards are nice for quick wiring projects but in the long run they are unreliable and look pretty nasty.

To crimp you will need:

• Crimper (or needle nose pliers if you’re really good)
• Wire (24 -26 gague usually)
• Crimp pins
• Housings (possibly)

Good crimpers don’t come cheap. Expect to pay $30 – $60 dollars for a good one. If you shop around you can find ‘ok’ crimpers for less. Most crimp tools you find in a automotive section of a store aren’t suitable for small wired electrical projects. You need to find something that will fit 22 – 26 gague wires. This crimp tool from Jameco works well for connetors for D-sub serial cable pins (it can also work on female/male crimp pins).

Take the wire you want to crimp something to and strip off about 4 mm from the end. You basically want to strip off enough insulation so that the exposed wire rests in the wire channel (the smaller second one) and the insulation rests in the insulation channel (the larger first one).

 

The wire should fit into the channels like the illustration shows. Make sure you have stripped enough insulation, but not too much.

Next, grab your crimp tool. On many tools there will be two different "levels" on the tooth of the tool. This makes sure that the insulation channel has a big crimp than the wire channel, since the stripped wire has a smaller diameter than the insulation. For tools that don’t have two different sizes on the tooth, you will have to make two crimps one for the insulation and using a smaller size, crimp the wire.

 

You can see the two different groove sizes in the picture to the left.

 

The next two images show how the pin is placed into the crimp too. The larger side of the crimp ‘tooth’ should be where the insulation channel fits.

 

Sorry for the blurry picture, but you can make it out, the pin is sitting in the groove with the ‘tabs’ facing into the groove. It is placed so that when the crimp too is squeezed the tabs bend inwards and create a "heart" shape.

If you apply light pressure to the tool at this point the crimp pin will slide up into the groove and be held in place.

At this point you can put the stripped end of the wire through the hole that is made by the crimp too and the insulation channel, like pictured:

Do your best to make sure the insulation channel only covers the insulation and the wire channel covers only the wire.

 

Apply firm pressure to the tool and it should perfectly bend the crimp tabs inwards so that they "bite" into the wire and insulation and form a solid contact.

It should look a bit like this:

You can seein the picture how the wire channel tabs bend inwards and bite into the insulation.

The pins pictured above are pins that would fit into a D-sub serial connector housing with which you can make a serial cable.

To connect something up to a bread board you can crimp on male crimp pins, like the ones I used on a programming cable I made for a Basic Stamp + breadboard.

 

If you wish to have crimp connections that connect up to square male pin headers you can buy handy female crimp pins.

The final step to making good connections to buy buy some housings to put your crimpped pins into. The housings keep all the pins seperate and easily pluggable.

I hope this helps someone avoid nasty wiring messes in the future. Happy robot hacking!

Everyone’s favorite robots+art exhibit, Artbots, has announced it’s exhibitors for this years show, to be held in Dublin, Ireland on July 15-17, 2005.

22 exhibits were chosen which encompass 33 different artists from 10 different countries. You can view a full list of exhibitors here. The projects are definitely worth taking a look at. I found Grower and Curiously Strong particularly interesting. One is a robot that draws green lines of varying heights on a wall based on the CO2 levels in the room. The other one is a long chain of altoids tins who’s lids can be popped open using a solenoids – the chain pops the lids in a domino-like fashion.

So, if you’re in Ireland in the next few weeks, go and check it out!

Two news stories about robots in the military and how they are helping to save our soldiers lives:

The first story, says that the enemy is wising up to their mechanical adversaries and are starting to target them. Better a robot than a soldier. The story focus’ on the Dragon Runner military ‘bot devloped by Carnegie Mellon University. Officials are calling it a, "critical piece of equipment" and the folks at CMU say they are going to double their product capacity soon.

The Army is using this as part of it’s larger plan for a $100 billion "Future Combat System" which includes lots of robots and is supposed to be in place by 2010. This will be a huge industry folks – better jump on the bandwagon now.

The second story shows how important mine nutralization robots are to the Amry. Instead of actually having to visit a munition in the field, a soldier can remotely drive the robot to the munition and determine how to disarm it.

iRobot also has an extensive product line of military robots. Take a look.

Update: Here’s another article about how robots are helping out soldiers. More detailed info on how the Dragon Runners are being used in Iraq.


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I never could have imagined that circuit components could make such attractive jewelery. Seriously. Not only do I (a male) find it really geeky and hot but I have it from a reliable female source (my not too geeky girlfriend) that it’s also quite cute.

My favorite would have to be the diode choker or the 33 ohm "ringsistor". Oh my goodnes, I love it!

A word of caution though: buying such jewelery isn’t cheap, so guys, break out that surplus component drawer in your shop and start making some oh-so-smooth jewelery for that girl you want to impress. I guarantee it will ‘induce’ an ‘electric’ feel in her.

For those of you that do end up making some, how about send me a picture? I’ll be sure to put it up on the front page for all the world to see. I will definitely be making some.



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Take a look at NASA’s latest revision to it’s Miniature Autonomous Extravehicular Robotic Camera (Mini AERCam) designed to help out spacecraft and ground crew see around and inside the spacecraft. The latest prototype, "nanosatelite", is 7.5 inches in diameter and weights around 10lbs.

"The Mini AERCam could provide beneficial on-orbit views that cannot be obtained from fixed cameras, cameras on robotic manipulators, or cameras carried by space-walking crewmembers." [Link].

Here’s a good summary of the satellite’s features. NASA itself also has a website devoted to the AERCam with an excellent overviews of the mechanical design, navigation, avionics, propulsion, vision, and power systems.


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The first time I heard about this guy, Theo Jansen, was in this news article. The video of one of his creations was amazing. Really amazing.

"Theo Jansen creates unique machines that collect wind with their wings, and store the energy in bottles that he calls their stomachs."

‘"It works with the wings in front, they pump up air in laminate bottles. That you could see as the wind stomach. They eat wind, they put it in the bottles and that’s energy which they can use for walking when the wind is gone," Jansen said.’

A quick Google image search of his name turns up quite a few contraptions.

Take a look at this one, from this page:


There’s videos of the multi-ton beast here.


"[each] of his beach beasts consists of thirty species, dispersed over seven periods in which they originated. Each of these periods is marked by a specific technique applied by the artist. A mutational jump ends the development within each species and leads to more complex ones."

On Mr. Jansen’s website, he writes:

"We start with a little pump. Since electricity tubes are available in two sizes, they quite easily fit into eachother. The smallest one is made a little bit tighter by using silicion glue. By doing so we create a little piston which is combined with the larger tube, thus creating a kind of pump."

…

" A futher stap (sic)  is the use of plastic mineral water bottles. In these bottles a considerable pressure up to 10 Bar can be stored, without the risk of exploding."

…

" The plastic bottles could also be connected to the pump of electricity tubes. The air squeezes the piston with force out, thus creating a kind of muscle, a pressing muscle."

Wired News has a good piece on his artwork.

There’s also quite a collection of movies on Jansen’s website.


Update: Here’s an interesting interview I found with Jansen.


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So I go and get this nice news post all typed up and Firefox crashes on me. Doh! Anyways, it should be obvious I’ve been pretty busy around here. I’m teaching a three week long robotics summer camp and between that and family stuff I don’t have much robot time. So, here goes a big link dump:

The robot display of park benches and trash cans at Cambridge got canceled because the robots didn’t work very well. "… The bins and benches lasted just three hours before being recaptured after running amok, slamming into everything in the vicinity." That certainly was £110, 000 well wasted. There’s also another story of a pill dispensing robot going crazy and busting in on a doctor doing an examination of a patient. Both humans fled the scene.

Here’s an interesting High School invention competition that goes by the name, InvenTeams, and is sponsored by none other than MIT. The teams are given $10,00 USD and 9 months to solve a problem of their choice. " … projects included an automatic pill dispenser, a wind-powered water-pump, a remotely operated vehicle for education and research, a[nd a] robotic tennis ball retriever."
Where was that when I was in highschool?

Look out Japan, but Korea wants to become the next robot superpower. They’re aiming for the number 3 slot by 2013 and are spending $29.5 billion to get there. They estimate $20 billion in exports and the creation of 100,000 new jobs. Meanwhile, Kim Jong Il simply says, "we don’t need no stiiinking robots, comrade."

Robot surgical nurse. And no, this isn’t like the ones we’ve seen before. This one independantly did the procedure by following commands given to it by the doctor. I imagine this could have major implications for the plastic surgery industry – robot surgery on the go. Punch the buttons and let the robot do it’s enlarging/lifting/tucking job.

And finally, a new robotvac is on the horizon, but this one claims to be really smart. According to the article, the robot navigates by reading RFID tages embedded into your carpet. Doesn’t work so well on the antique Persian rugs, but will the carpets of the future be laced with silicon?


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I saw this link on hackaday (great site, btw). In the article it describes how to hack your normal track ball mouse and use those nifty encoders inside of it to do shaft encoding. It’s a pretty simple hack, really, only involving desoldering a few components and then reattaching them to a perf board.

If you aren’t familiar with quadrature encoding, National Instruments has a brief description of it.

The only problem is that you might have difficulty hooking the encoder up to something to actually measure (usually a wheel). Let me know how it works out.


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Welcome folks to the new GoRobotics.net website.

Basically, the old site was just too finicky to really be useful so I decided to change it over to an established CMS (content management system for the uninitiated) so I wouldn’t have to worry about coding, but could concentrate on bringing you all the best of today’s robotics related news and hacks.

I’ve got some cool plans for the future (near and far) but right now it’s pretty barebones. You can still find all the original articles under the "Articles" link up top. When I post a new article you find it right here on the front page along with all the latest news.

Since "blogging" seems to be the current cool trend, and since I consider myself to be a cool kid, I’m shifting the focus a bit to a more bloggish feel. More updates (days instead of months between updates) more frequently. News posts. Interviews. And, whatever else I (and y’all) feel like. BUT, I need your help. Shoot me e-mail at william@gorobotics.net or an IM at ‘gorobotics’ (AIM).

Happy robot hacking!


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Here’s a pretty comprehensive article on Toshiba’s quest for a "life support robot." They will be demoing the robots at the Prototype Robot Exhibition in Japan from June 9 to 19th. The will be demoing two robots – Robot one is able to recognize a specific voice in a crowd from any direction and then locate that voice. Robot two can follow a specific person in a crowd. "As the subject moves, an integrated ultrasonic sensor checks for obstacles in the robot’s way, and the robot negotiates these while maintaining visual contact with the person."

The following robot size is as follows: diameter 380mm, heigt 430mm, weight 10kg.
The hearing robot is: diameter 450mm, heigt 900mm, weight 30kg.


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Check out the picture and tell me if it isn’t a bit … weird. No, not the guy, the woman – She’s fake! She’s yet another feature at the World Expo 2005 which we covered previously.

It/she breaths in a human like manner, has 31 points of articulation in her torso, skin-like silicon covering, natural eye movements, and evil glowing red eyes (well, at least in my nightmares).

National Geo has a blurb about her.


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Well folks, here’s your opportunity to fulfill all your childhood dreams of having a robotic helicopter. Check out the Cheap Robotic Helicopter Howto. The intro reads:

This document explains how to build a 300 g, 3D-capable helicopter with embedded Linux and Bluetooth datalink for less than 500 EUR.

The processor for the design is the Linux SBC Gumstix.

Here are some links to various RC helicopters to get you started:

• Ikarus Piccolo
• Hornet
• Mini Dragonfly
• Hummingbird
• Aerohawk
  

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Circle you calendars for June 28-30. AUVSI is putting on their annual robotics shindig! You can read the official press release or visit the website here. Highlights are said to include "150,000 square feet of hardware and static equipment displax," lots of cool talks, good networking, and over 200 exhibitors.


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For the next three weeks I’m going to be teaching the Duke TIP robotics summer camp along with my good friend, Ken Boone. This whole week I’ve been swamped with setting up and training for that. Apologies on no posts. So, here’s the link dump from this week:

• The forty DARPA Grand Challenge teams were chosen this week. I happened to go out and see one team, Insight Racing, demo their ubercool robotic Bronco this morning. One of the team members, Brian Dean, is part of my local club.  The official press release is here. The 40 teams will go to semi-finals in late September and out of them, 20 will be chosen to go to the actual competition in early October. Good luck to you all. Short bit about CMU’s robot here.
  
• Here’s some discussion on walking robots modeled after the discovery the octopusses can "walk" on two tenticles.
• Here’s an article along the lines of "here’s a wickely cool new device (that won’t be ready for another 20 years)!!" Nanotech "clay" devices that can morph into anything. I’ll believe it when I see it.
• A newsbit about a robot that supossedly going to be protecting the Worldcup 2006 event. Costs 80k euros and capable of searching 10k sq/ft for 12 hrs before a tuneup/recharge. Here’s the company product lineup.
  

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