There are plenty of “robot” projects out there that are really just a small remote control platform of some sort. We often like to think of robots of having some sort of autonomy though. [Luca Fagioli] demonstrates a great example of this with his explorer robot that uses Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) to navigate its environment.

The robot is a built on a small plastic chassis, with one gear motor per drive wheel. Running the show is an Arduino Uno R4 Wi-Fi, paired with the Sensor Shield 5.0 and an L298N motor driver board. There’s also an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor module onboard, mounted atop an SG-90 servo motor so it can be panned around. The ultrasonic sensor determines the range between the robot and surrounding walls, and a map is constructed at the same time as the robot is localizing itself within it. There are also infrared sensors on the bottom of the robot for detecting tape marks on the floor for checkpointing purposes.

Often, SLAM mapping is done with advanced laser rangefinders or time of flight sensors, but there are many ways to go about it as this project demonstrates. We’ve even seen it done in a distributed manner with coordinated drones combining their efforts. Overall, it’s a highly useful technique for robot navigation and wayfinding.

[Angus] of Maker’s Muse enjoys combat robotics, in which contenders zip about in an arena, attempting to disable one another with weapons that lift, spin, and smash. He got a funny idea a short while ago and wondered whether a stiff mane of bristles could serve as lightweight, ablative, impact resistant armor?

Just to set the stage, [Angus]’s new robot competes in the plastic antweight (or “plant”) division, in which robots are limited to 150 grams with both chassis and weapons made of plastic. In such circumstances, one can see how a mane of thick, rigid “hairs” might actually punch above its weight, so to speak.

Nothing settles a question like a good experiment, so [Angus] sat down and redesigned his latest robot to replace its outer shell with a thick wad of bristles, in the style of a 3D printed lion’s mane. Filament is bridged between the model and an outer support structure, which is cut away afterwards to expose the “hairs”.

How well did it perform? Well enough to merit further study! Where past robots got their outer shells broken up, the hairy robot seems to have come through quite intact. It seems the idea might not be as silly as it first seemed, at least in the plastic antweight division.

3D printers have been fantastic in the field of combat robotics. First they were great because they made custom parts easier and more accessible to hobbyists, but things have evolved more since then. Now folks compete by putting motors and electronics inside almost entirely 3D printed robots. There’s never been a better time to get into combat robotics, and experiment with unorthodox designs.

If you want to try a hairy robot for yourself, be sure to watch the followup in which [Angus] improves the hair-generating process considerably.

Sometimes, you want to build a simple project– the minimum viable product that solves your problem and nothing else. Other times you might be feeling a little extra, and want to use oodles of machined aluminum, six steppers, two cameras, a Teensy and a PC with a GPU just to bounce a ball. That’s the mood behind [T-Kuhn]’s hexa-bouncer, a Stewart Platform on steroids.  You can read all about it on his blog or witness it in action in the video below.  Trust us, really have to see it in action.

The six stepper motors connected to planetary gearboxes each drive an arm. Ingenious linkages allow the steppers to control a ping-pong paddle in every axis of rotation and translation. A Teensy 4.0 coordinates those steppers, but the marching orders are coming from a PC where a Unity application — available on GitHub — is performing Inverse Kinematics using the two cameras to track the ball in 3D. You might imagine a GPU comes in handy there. Both the article and the video get into more detail on the IK.

As for the physical build, as stated, it’s mostly aluminum milled out on [T-Kuhn]’s CNC machine, and while the pieces aren’t actually innumerable, he has to carve out 27 chunks of aluminum for each arm– plus all the bits in the base. The total count is over 300. It’s a very impressive robot to do the very mundane job of ball bouncing, which makes it probably the most overengineered thing we’ve seen this week. Kudos to [Tobias] for that!

Most of the other hexapods we’ve seen have been upside down in comparison, but since the last metal one was a horrifying man-carrying walker, we’ll forgive their misalignment. The computer vision workflow [T-Kuhn] is using for ball tracking is one he pioneered on his octo-bounce robot, which we also covered.

Thanks to [Tobias] for the tip! If you’ve built something so amazingly over-the-top that friends and family question your sanity, bounce it into our tips line! We understand.