Industrial robot transformed into fireball-throwing ‘RoboPult’

January 28, 2008

A duo of former robotics engineers in Santa Monica, Calif. hacked together a borrowed Kuka industrial robot, some VB code and a laptop to create a computer-guided, fireball-throwing catapult—or “RoboPult”—that’s able to destroy a car with bowling balls from 80 feet away.

With a budget of US$1,000, Aaron Rasmussen and Eli Szasz, who both quit the tech industry to pursue entrepreneurial goals, combined the Kuka robot with a computer vision system to control the contraption from a laptop. They then wrote targeting software in VB.NET that overlaid a 3-D range finder over a photograph of the target area.

“The former was very simple, and just required dividing the horizontal field of view by the pixels in the image,” Rasmussen writes on his website, which gives a step-by-step how-to guide of their project. “This calculation yielded a pixel-to-angle conversion from pixels in the image to angle between the camera, located at the base of the robot, and the target.

A lot went into finding the ultimate range of the catapult, but they ultimately decided to try targeting by manually punching in the numbers from the laptop into the controller. In their quest to find the maximum range, they tried many things, such as getting five of the axes to rotate at the same time and giving it more snap in the wrist (the axis connected to the aluminum extrusion).

The result? The RoboPult started throwing bowling balls well past the team’s 100-foot measuring tape—Rasmussen guesses they went as far as 120 feet. Predictably, the load of beer cans didn’t make it quite that far.

For a look at all the photos, detailed how-to information and general carnage inflicted, visit the team’s website:
www.manapotions.com/robopult.html