Make a transformer robot from improvised means. Make a robot at home on your own? Easily! Stages of making a home robot

Even those who have just picked up a soldering iron can make the simplest robot.

Mostly our robot (depending on the design) will run towards the light or, on the contrary, run away from it, run forward in search of a ray of light, or back away like a mole.

For our future "artificial intelligence" we will need:

1. Chip L293D
2. Small electric motor M1 (can be pulled out of toy cars)
3. Phototransistor and resistor with a nominal value of 200 ohms.
4. Wires, a battery and, of course, the platform itself, where it will all be placed.

If you add a couple more bright LEDs to the design, then you can easily achieve that the robot will simply run after your hand or even follow a light or dark line. Our creation will be a typical representative of BEAM class robots. The principle of behavior of such robots is based on "photoreception", that is, light, in this case, will act as a source of information.

Our robot will move forward when a beam of light hits it. This behavior of the device is called "photokinesis" - non-directional increase or decrease in mobility in response to changes in light levels.

In our device, as mentioned above, a phototransistor was used n-p-n structures– PTR-1 as photosensor. Here you can use not only a phototransistor, but also a photoresistor or a photodiode, since the principle of operation for all elements is the same.

The figure immediately shows wiring diagram robot. If you are not yet familiar with the technical symbols, then, here, based on this scheme, it will not be difficult to understand the principles of designating and connecting elements to each other.

GND. The wires connecting the various elements of the circuit to the "ground" (the negative pole of the power source) are usually not shown in full on the diagrams. Instead, a small dash is drawn, indicating a connection to the "ground". Sometimes, next to the dash they write "GND" - from Eng. the words "ground" - earth.

Vcc. This designation shows that the circuit is connected to the power supply through this part - Positive pole! Sometimes on the diagrams, instead of these letters, the current rating is often written. In this case +5V.

The principle of the robot.

When a light beam hits the phototransistor (in the diagram, it is indicated as PRT1), a positive signal appears at the output of the INPUT1 microcircuit, which makes the M1 motor work. And vice versa, when the light beam stops illuminating the phototransistor, the signal at the output of the INPUT1 chip disappears, therefore, the motor stops.

Resistor R1 in this circuit is designed to compensate for the current passing through the phototransistor. The value of the resistor is 200 Ohm - of course, you can solder resistors here with other values, but it should be remembered that the sensitivity of the phototransistor, and hence the performance of the robot itself, will depend on the value.

If the value of the resistor is large, then the robot will only respond to a very bright beam of light, and if it is small, then the sensitivity will be much higher.

In short, resistors with a resistance of less than 100 ohms should not be used in this circuit, otherwise the phototransistor may simply overheat and fail.

Digital and analog multimeters Reading circuits: shielding, grounding Reading circuits: lamps and photocells Repair electric kettle Do-it-yourself clock with image projection

Who would not like to have a universal assistant ready to carry out any task: wash the dishes, buy food, change the wheel in the car, and even take the children to the garden, and the parents to work? The idea of ​​creating mechanized assistants has occupied engineering minds since ancient times. And Karel Capek even came up with a word for a mechanical servant - a robot that performs duties instead of a person.

Fortunately, in the current digital age, such assistants are sure to become a reality soon. In fact, intelligent mechanisms already help a person with household chores: a robot vacuum cleaner will clean up while the owners are at work, a slow cooker will help cook food, no worse than a self-collecting tablecloth, and a playful Aibo puppy will happily bring slippers or a ball. Complex robots are used in manufacturing, medicine and space. They allow you to partially, or even completely, replace human labor in complex or hazardous conditions. Androids are trying to look like people, while industrial robots are usually created for economic and technological reasons and their external decor is by no means a priority.

But it turns out that you can try to make a robot using improvised means. So, you can design an original mechanism from a telephone receiver, a computer mouse, a toothbrush, an old camera or the ubiquitous plastic bottle. By placing several sensors on the platform, such a robot can be programmed to perform simple operations: adjusting the light, giving signals, moving around the room. Of course, this is far from a multifunctional assistant from science fiction films, but such an activity develops ingenuity and creative engineering thinking, and unconditionally arouses admiration among those who consider robotics to be absolutely not handicraft.

Cyborg out of the box

One of the most simple solutions on the way to making a robot - purchase a ready-made robotics kit with step by step guide. This option is also suitable for those who are going to seriously engage in technical creativity, because one package contains all the necessary parts for mechanics: from electronic boards and specialized sensors, to a stock of bolts and stickers. Along with instructions that allow you to create a rather complex mechanism. Thanks to the many accessories, such a robot can serve as an excellent base for creativity.

Basic school knowledge in physics and skills from labor lessons are enough to assemble the first robot. A variety of sensors and motors obey control panels, and special programming environments allow you to create real cyborgs that can execute commands.

For example, the sensor of a mechanical robot can detect the presence or absence of a surface in front of the device, and the program code can indicate in which direction the wheelbase should be turned. This robot will never fall off the table! By the way, real robotic vacuum cleaners work on a similar principle. In addition to cleaning according to a set schedule and the ability to return to the base for recharging on time, this intelligent assistant can independently build cleaning trajectories. Since the floor can contain a variety of obstacles, such as chairs and wires, the robot must constantly scan the path ahead and avoid such obstacles.

In order for a self-created robot to be able to execute various commands, manufacturers provide for the possibility of programming it. Having compiled an algorithm for the behavior of the robot in various conditions, you should create a code for the interaction of sensors with the outside world. This is possible due to the presence of a microcomputer, which is the brain center of such a mechanical robot.

Mobile mechanism of own production

Even without specialized, and usually expensive, kits, it is quite possible to make a mechanical manipulator with improvised means. So, having caught fire with the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bcreating a robot, you should carefully analyze the stocks of home bins for the presence of unclaimed spare parts that can be used in this creative undertaking. Will go:

• a motor (for example, from an old toy);
• wheels from toy cars;
• designer details;
• carton boxes;
• fountain pen refills;
• adhesive tape of different types;
• glue;
• buttons, beads;
• screws, nuts, paper clips;
• all kinds of wires;
• light bulbs;
• battery (suitable for the motor voltage).

Tip: "It's a good skill when building a robot to be able to handle a soldering iron, because it will help to securely fasten the mechanism, especially electrical components."

With the help of these publicly available components, you can create a real technical miracle.

So, in order to make your own robot from materials available at home, you should:

1. prepare the found parts for the mechanism, check their performance;
2. draw a layout of the future robot, taking into account the available equipment;
3. fold the body for the robot from the designer or cardboard parts;
4. glue or solder the parts responsible for the movement of the mechanism (for example, fasten the robot motor to the wheelbase);
5. provide power to the motor by connecting it with a conductor to the corresponding contacts of the battery;
6. supplement themed decor device.

Tip: “Beady eyes for a robot, decorative wire antenna horns, spring legs, diode bulbs will help to animate even the most boring mechanism. These elements can be attached with glue or tape.

You can make the mechanism of such a robot in a few hours, after which it remains to come up with a name for the robot and present it to admiring viewers. Surely some of them will pick up an innovative idea and be able to make their own mechanical characters.

Famous smart machines

Cute robot wall-e wins over the viewer of the film of the same name, forcing him to empathize with his dramatic adventures, while the Terminator demonstrates the power of a soulless invincible machine. Star Wars characters, faithful droids R2D2 and C3PO, accompany them on their journeys through the galaxy far, far away, and the romantic Werther even sacrifices himself in a fight with space pirates.

Outside of cinema, there are also mechanical robots. So, the world admires the skills of the humanoid robot Asimo, who can walk up the stairs, play football, serve drinks and say hello politely. The Spirit and Curiosity rovers are equipped with autonomous chemical laboratories, which made it possible to analyze samples of Martian soils. Unmanned robotic cars can move without human intervention, even along complex city streets with high risks of unforeseen events.

Perhaps it is from home attempts to create the first intelligent mechanisms that inventions will grow that will change the technical panorama of the future and the life of mankind.

A robot is an independent and often autonomous device that operates according to an internal program. Nearly creature, only with electronic brains. Robots can do a lot, but still no more than what their creator put in them.

After watching a video about robots, I decided to try to make a robot out of a simple toy myself. What is needed for this? Let's start with the toy itself. (Take it from your child before it breaks). The toy itself determines how the robot will look and what it can do. I took a simple tractor with remote control King Force 300 (not a single child was harmed in the manufacture of the robot)

Of course, it will not be a human-like robot, but the tractor still has to drive independently and squeak joyfully with or without reason. Video at the end.
When choosing a toy for robotization, it is important to clarify how many motors it has on wheels. In some cheap models, both tracks are driven by one motor, which will not allow the tractor to maneuver, and driving back and forth is not interesting. The Chinese, as always, made a one-time thing, so for normal operation the toy had to be a little after which it was not scary to robotize it. There is confidence that she will not drop the wheels right away, but will ride a little to the delight of me and the children.

Born to ride, he cannot fly. Those. our robot will move back and forth, left and right. And still jerk the bucket as a bonus. The King Force 300 originally had a plow as well, but it is driven by the same motor as the bucket and takes up valuable space in the back, where I planned to put an infrared bumper, so the plow had to be brutally amputated. But the screws went to screw the switch, which is also good.

That is, there are only three motors in the machine, and we need to control two motors for movement, each of which must rotate forward and backward, and one engine for lifting the bucket, which must rotate only in one direction.
If you need to turn the engine on and off, this is implemented simply on a powerful transistor, but if you need to change its polarity, then you cannot do without a special circuit. Either implement the so-called H-bridge yourself, or buy a ready-made motor driver.
Robot parts stores abound with various ready-made boards (shields) that can be bought and quickly assembled into a single device, but here you need to strike a balance between the price and the laboriousness of manufacturing such a board.

Instead of buying an infrared sensor for about 500 rubles, you can solder a couple of transistors and LEDs on a simple breadboard and get the same thing only ten times cheaper, especially if you want to make several sensors. In the end, I bought this motor driver and this HC-SR04 ultrasonic rangefinder, and soldered the robot's motherboard and infrared bumper on a simple breadboard with just wires without using ferric chloride etching, etc. joys. The only thing is that the soldering iron must have a thin tip in order to solder the chip pads. At first I wanted to use a solderless breadboard, but still decided to solder it so that the wires would fall off less.
By the way, twisted-pair wires are great for wiring such a board. Copper, moderately hard and good for soldering. I think everyone has a meter or two of twisted-pair remnants for this kind of entertainment. motherboard I did not take it ready-made to save space inside the tractor. There will not fit much, so I soldered it myself as inaccurately as possible. The heartbreaking sight of tangled wires can be seen in the video. As a result, it turned out that the wires also interfere with each other, especially those that go to the engines.
In order to be able to assemble and disassemble the device, I had to make all the sensors on the connectors.

Remained main question– about the brains of the robot. All these motors need to be controlled somehow. The computer is too big, and it won't fit into the tractor. Therefore, we take the simplest option. One of the Arduino clones. There are many different prices and sizes. Although this is not the best controller, not the fastest and it does not have too many features, it is easy to program, there are many examples of how to do it, there are ready-made libraries for working with a rangefinder and an infrared receiver, so Arduino is quite sufficient for our task.
Arduino Nano very even compact version to put inside the tractor. I had a Carduino Nano V.7 clone, so I used it, by the way, this scarf has a feature - an SPK output, where you can connect our bucket directly without any motor drivers and additional transistors. At the same time, it is tied inside through a transistor to digital port 11. So look at the diagram, the transistor is drawn on the outside, but in fact the motor is connected to the output of the SPK and uses an internal transistor.

Food. Arduino is powered by +5 volts. Our engines perceive something around 6 volts, to be absolutely accurate, then we have four AA batteries in the remote control, they are 1.5 volts each, I didn’t see any additional circuits, therefore 6 volts are supplied directly to the engines - this pleases, because it is not necessary decrease-increase the voltage from the batteries. I plan to power the circuit with four batteries. They are 1.2 volts, therefore, in the end, 4.8 will go to the circuit - enough for the normal power supply of Arduino without additional stabilizers and limiters, it will also work for engines.

For simple control connected the infrared receiver, in fact, now the tractor has an infrared remote control remote control and a bunch of buttons.

I bought all sorts of combs, battery compartments, capacitors-resistors in a chip dip. If you order via the Internet, then the price is generally normal, but at retail there are absolutely insane prices. But you can buy almost all the parts in one place. And here is where I bought a breadboard.
And a few more details.

After desoldering, the main problem was that the Arduino is very sensitive to interference. Since the motors are clearly brushed, they create strong interference during operation, I had to additionally solder a large number of 0.1 microfarad capacitors wherever possible. At the same time, the bucket engine strongly influenced the rangefinder, I even had to put an additional filter coil on the bucket engine (I soldered it from a burned-out energy-saving lamp), and in addition to the capacitors, put a ferrite filter on the power wire on the rangefinder. I originally had the idea to use the rangefinder as a sensor for raising and lowering the bucket. Since the bucket obscures the rangefinder in the lower state and opens in the raised state, it is possible to stop the rise when the rangefinder has changed dramatically. So we had to deal with interference. The rangefinder is too close to the engine, and the wiring contributes to the wires pointing at each other.

Wheel motors strongly influenced everything in general. When starting forward, the Arduino hung. By the way, the ride was fine. Which is very similar to interference in the power supply in one direction, the engines had little effect, and everything hung in the other. As a result, I had to replace the wires from the motors to the motor driver with shielded wires, connect the screen to the power minus. Make power and ground a star and, additionally, put a 100 ohm resistor on the power supply of the infrared sensor, which also shields interference a little, of course, not like a coil, but still. On a good note, each output of the motor needs to be connected to the ground through the capacitor in order to shed interference, but I just didn’t have room for additional capacitors, they just stand in parallel. But the shielded wire greatly reduced the influence of the motors on the circuit. Below is a diagram of what happened. How it all works can be seen in the video.

Usually we talk about robots created by various research centers or companies. However, robots are assembled by ordinary people around the world with varying degrees of success. So, today we bring you ten homemade robots.

Adam

A German neuroscience student assembled an android named Adam. Its name stands for Advanced Dual Arm Manipulator or "advanced two-handed manipulator". The robot's arms have five degrees of freedom. They are driven by the Robolink joints of the German company Igus. External cables are used to rotate Adam's joints. In addition, two video cameras, a loudspeaker, a speech synthesizer, and an LCD panel that simulates the movements of the robot's lips are installed on Adam's head.

MPR-1

The MPR-1 robot is notable for the fact that it is not constructed from iron or plastic, like most of its counterparts, but from paper. According to the creator of the robot, artist Kikousya, the materials for the MPR-1 are paper, a few dowels, and a couple of rubber bands. At the same time, the robot moves confidently, although its mechanical elements are also made of paper. The crank mechanism provides the movement of the legs of the robot, and its feet are designed so that their surface is always parallel to the floor.

Robot Paparazzi Boxie

The Boxie robot was created by American engineer Alexander Reben from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Boxie, who looks somewhat like the hero of the well-known cartoon Wall-E, must help the media. The small and nimble paparazzi is completely made of cardboard, he moves with the help of caterpillars, and navigates the street using ultrasound, which helps him overcome various obstacles. The robot takes the interview in a funny childish voice, and the respondent can interrupt the conversation at any time by pressing a special button. Boxie can record up to six hours of video and send it to its owner using the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot.

Morphex

Norwegian engineer Kare Halvorsen has created a six-legged Morphex robot that can turn into a ball and back. In addition, the robot is able to move. The movement of the robot is due to the motors pushing it forward. The robot moves in an arc, not a straight line. Due to its design, Morphex cannot independently correct the trajectory of its movement. AT this moment Halvorsen is working to resolve this issue. An interesting update is coming: the creator of the robot wants to add 36 LEDs that would allow Morphex to change colors.

truckbot

Americans Tim Heath and Ryan Hickman decided to create a small robot based on an Android phone. The Truckbot robot they created is quite simple in terms of its design: the HTC G1 phone is on top of the robot, being its “brain”. At the moment, the robot is able to move on a flat surface, choose the direction of movement and accompany with all sorts of phrases collision with obstacles.

Robot shareholder

Once an American, Brian Dory, who develops expansion boards, faced the following problem: it is very difficult to solder a two-row pin comb with your own hands. Brian needed an assistant, so he decided to create a robot that could solder. It took Brian two months to develop the robot. The made robot is equipped with two soldering irons that can solder two rows of contacts at the same time. You can control the robot through a PC and a tablet.

Mechatronic Tank

Every family has its favorite hobby. For example, in the family of the American engineer Robert Beatty, they construct robots. Robert is helped by his teenage daughters, and his wife and newborn daughter provide them with moral support. Their most impressive creation is the self-propelled Mechatronic Tank. With 20 kg of armor, this security robot is a threat to any criminal. Eight sonar mounted on the robot's tower allow it to calculate the distance to objects in its field of view to within an inch. The robot also shoots metal bullets at a speed of a thousand rounds per minute.

robot dog

An American named Max created a mini-copy of the famous. load-bearing structure robot Max made from scraps of a five-millimeter acrylic glass, and to fasten all parts together he used ordinary threaded bolts. In addition, when creating the robot, miniature servos were used that are responsible for the movement of its limbs, as well as parts from the Arduino Mega kit, which coordinate the motor process of a mechanical dog.

robot ball

The gingerbread robot was designed by Jerome Demers, it works on solar panels. There is a capacitor inside the robot that is connected to the solar powered parts. It is needed to accumulate energy in bad weather. When solar energy enough, the ball starts to roll forward.

Roboarm

Initially, Georgia Tech professor Gil Weinberg designed a robotic arm for a drummer whose arm had been amputated. Jill then created an automated timing technology that would allow a two-armed drummer to use his robotic arm as a extra hand. Robohand reacts to the way the drummer plays, creating its own rhythm. The robotic arm also knows how to improvise, while analyzing the rhythm in which the drummer plays.