Meet the Scythe: a landscaping robot that can cut grass safely and more efficiently. This autonomous robot doesn’t make a whole lot of noise and has all day battery life. It comes LTE and WiFi connectivity. This robot has a cutting height of 1.5-6″ and top speed of 10mph.
Here is a robot kit that comes with everything you need to experiment with your own walking robot. The Bakiwi is an open source robot that contains all electronics and mechanical components you need to put it together. More advanced users can always customize its legs an body.
There are plenty of fancy robotic mowers on the market but many struggle to take on steep hills. The SDR Remote Control Steep Slope Mower is a robomower that can handle slopes up to 38 degrees. It has 4 x 75RPM motors and 13″ all-terrain tires. You can remotely start/stop the mower with the flip of a switch.
In the past few years, we have covered many bio-inspired robots here. This electrohydraulic Arachno-bot is also worth a look. A team of researchers of the Robotic Materials Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of Colorado Boulder were inspired by spiders’ joints to develop robots without bulky components and connectors. As they explain:
they built a flexible pouch made of thin plastic films (either polyester or polypropylene will do) which they filled with a liquid dielectric—a vegetable-based oil. They then placed electrodes on each side of the pouch. These liquid-filled pockets serve as actuators, in which the hydraulic power is generated through electrostatic forces. The pouch is attached to a rotary joint. When a high voltage is applied between the electrodes, the electrostatic forces cause the liquid dielectric to shift inside the pouch and the joint to flex.
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In the past few years, we have covered plenty of robots that can navigate uneven terrain. In certain cases, it is much easier for robots to move small obstacles out of the way. This video from Bethany Lu, Benjamin Tam, Navinda Kottege shows how legged robots traversing in a confined environment can use their legs to manipulate obstacles and continue on their path:
a hexapod robot autonomously generates manipulation trajectories for detected obstacles. Using a RGB-D sensor as input, the obstacle is extracted from the environment and filtered to provide key contact points for the manipulation algorithm to calculate a trajectory to move the obstacle out of the path.
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Here is another cool STEM kit that can introduce your kids to coding and electronics. The MakeKit Hover:bit 2.0 kit is ready for Python and JavaScript programming but also supports block based coding. It has a max drifting speed of up to 18 miles per hour.
In the future, robots going to build our houses for us. In fact, Habitat for Humanity is now building a 3D printed home in Tempe. It involves using a robot to build a home one layer at a time. The walls are made with a concrete mix with polymers and other materials.
Here is smart AI robot designed to deal with the issue of plastic pollution in the oceans. This fully automated robot comes with machine learning to detect marine plastics within 2 meters. Razer partnered with ClearBot to pull this off.
In the past few years, we have covered plenty of weeding robots that can make life easier to farmers. This video from Yamagata Design shows a weeding robot for organic rice fields. It is a mini boat that drive around to stop weed growth.
Meet the OceBot: an unmanned ground vehicle ready for surveillance missions. It can climb obstacles and stairs and has 4 cameras to assist it in navigation. It has specially designed wheels that help it overcome uneven terrain. They can absorb forces from up to a 2-meter fall.
