Planet Arduino

Your dog has nerve endings covering its entire body, giving it a sense of touch. It can feel the ground through its paws and use that information to gain better traction or detect harmful terrain. For robots to perform as well as their biological counterparts, they need a similar level of sensory input. In pursuit of that goal, the Autonomous Robots Lab designed TRACEPaw for legged robots.

TRACEPaw (Terrain Recognition And Contact force Estimation Paw) is a sensorized foot for robot dogs that includes all of the hardware necessary to calculate force and classify terrain. Most systems like this use direct sensor readings, such as those from force sensors. But TRACEPaw is unique in that it uses indirect data to infer this information. The actual foot is a deformable silicone hemisphere. A camera looks at that and calculates the force based on the deformation it sees. In a similar way, a microphone listens to the sound of contact and uses that to judge the type of terrain, like gravel or dirt.

To keep TRACEPaw self-contained, Autonomous Robots Lab chose to utilize an Arduino Nicla Vision board. That has an integrated camera, microphone, six-axis motion sensor, and enough processing power for onboard machine learning. Using OpenMV and TensorFlow Lite, TRACEPaw can estimate the force on the silicone pad based on how much it deforms during a step. It can also analyze the audio signal from the microphone to guess the terrain, as the silicone pad sounds different when touching asphalt than it does when touching loose soil.

More details on the project are available on GitHub.

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Poisonous plants, like poison ivy, can really ruin your day. In an effort to combat this “green menace,” YouTuber Sciencish decided to create his own quadruped robot.

The robotic dog is equipped with two servos per leg, for a total eight, which enable it to move its shoulders and elbows back and forth.

An Arduino Uno controller determines leg positions via trigonometric calculation, and when in position, it dispenses weed killer via a relay and aquarium pump setup. The reservoir can also be used to hold other liquids, whether for watering duties or even to provide extra fuel to a fire.

Mech-Dickel Robotics has designed a beautiful quadruped robot dubbed mechDOG, which utilizes a dozen servos for motion. This gives each leg three degrees of freedom, allowing the cat-sized beast to travel a meter in 8.46 seconds. While it won’t break any speed records, creating a walking motion on this sort of unstable platform is an impressive feat in itself.

mechDOG is controlled by an Arduino Uno, while a Lynxmotion Smart Servo Adapter Board interfaces with the servos themselves. The device is remote-controlled via an RF unit, though it does have a pair of ultrasonic sensors that presumably could be used for obstacle avoidance. 

You can check it out in action in the videos below, looking sharp in its yellow-finished aluminum sheet metal chassis.

Although we can’t all have the MIT Mini Cheetah at home, Jegatheesan Soundarapandian decided to make his own version — measuring just 23 cm x 9 cm x 9 cm.

As shown in the video below, the aptly named “Baby Cheetah” does an amazing job of getting around on four legs, and is not only able to walk upright, but can even move at a crouch, turn, and tilt forwards or backwards.

The robot is equipped with eight SG90 servos to actuate each 3D-printed leg linage assembly, giving the limbs excellent mobility in a vertical plane. An Arduino Nano is used for control, while an HC-05 Bluetooth module links to a smartphone running a custom app for user interface. 

More info and Arduino code is available in Soundarapandian’s project write-up.