Half-Built-Robots: page 2

TL;DR: In 2019 I built a robotic sixth finger, named it after a Hungarian shaman, and then, during debugging, put it inside a plastic box because I had decided it was trying to get away from me. I…

Táltos is the shaman of Hungarian mythology, and one of the traits that supposedly marked someone as a táltos was being born with a physical abnormality, like an extra finger. So a Táltos-oid is a…

Part 1 was the long road out of WordPress. This is the short road onto Cloudflare Pages, and it is short mostly because Pages doesn't leave you much to do. You connect the repo, tell it the build…

In the cutover post I said that if I did my job right, you couldn't tell the blog changed engines. What I glossed over is how much of that job was actually mine. A large portion of the mechanical…

The blog you are reading is no longer WordPress. As of this week, half-built-robots is a static site built with Astro and served from Cloudflare. If I did my job right, you shouldn't be able to tell…

A cobot on a factory floor is only as good as the person programming it. The people who are good at that have been doing it for years, and most operators are not those people. There is a persistent…

Most manufacturing work was designed for a pair of human hands. Put a cobot on the line and someone has to take that work apart and decide which pieces go to the robot and which stay with the person…

Working next to a cobot means sharing a task with a machine that runs on its own for a while and then needs you. The robot’s half takes care of itself. The hard part is guessing when your half is…

Back in Fall 2018, I took CS 534 (Computational Photography) at UW-Madison. The term project was open-ended, so naturally my team and I decided to see if we could get a neural network to generate…

When you’re working on human-robot interaction research, there’s a surprisingly mundane problem that keeps showing up. The robot needs to know where things are. Specifically, in our case, the robot…