Hanging Around In Brooklyn
It’s been five months since the whirlwind adventure that was the Edinburgh Fringe Fest. I’ve decided to take a break from robots and head back to NYC to hang out with The Paper Dolls. This time in Brooklyn. They’re working on a new doubles act for aerial silk slated to debut at the House Of Yes for The Sky Box‘s monthly cabaret show.
SpaceExplorer & Processing
I spent a few moments today trying to cobble together an interface for driving multi-DOF robots around. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything with inverse kinematics, but it seems like a good place to start. First things first though. Having a controller than can come close to expressing the range of motion in a hexapod is going to be useful for moving the IK chain targets around.
Paper Robots, Part 3
One of the often overlooked, and rather important steps in discovering a novel solution to a problem, is getting it wrong the first half dozen times. It helps inform the design process later, and allows one to not worry so damn much about the current state of affairs. Other things that help that process along are not worrying about it costing too much, or being too emotionally invested in the outcome because you’ve already spent so much money that you can’t stop now. This is something that organizations and individuals seem to struggle with.
Paper Robots, Part 2
Paper linkages are pretty neat, but ultimately if I want these little parts to do anything I need to figure out how to make them move. Not being force based actuators, servos are the wrong answer, but they’re cheap and I have piles of them. Because of their ubiquity, supporting hardware is easy to find as well. For example, these excellent low cost, high channel count PWM servo driver boards from Pololu.
Paper Robots, Part 1
I’ve been trying to make little paper robots. Or rather, I’ve been trying to create a library of mechanical linkages that I could later make robots with. Paper is cheap, easy to work with, and I can try out a bunch of different ideas quickly without breaking my piggy-bank. In some forms, such as cardboard, paper is extremely strong for its weight. This makes it an ideal platform for building robots, and leads to The First Problem with robotics: any sufficiently agile robot will weigh less than its power supply.