Skip to main content

This robot can mimic your hand gestures and whoop you at rock-paper-scissors

Android Things Presents: HandBot

From smart speakers like the Google Home and Amazon Echo to the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner, there are a growing number of smart A.I.s and robots we can call on to perform different tasks in our homes. A new collaboration between innovation studio Deeplocal and Google’s Internet of Things (IoT) framework Android Things wants to add another robotic helping hand to the mix — and we mean that quite literally.

Called HandBot, it’s a D.I.Y. robotic hand which can recognize your hand gestures and mimic them back to you, or compete against you in a classic game of rock-paper-scissors. To do this, it uses some smart machine learning-based image recognition, courtesy of an built-in camera that feeds it images of your movement.

Related Videos

“We teamed up with Deeplocal to build a series of demos to help inspire and show what developers can build by harnessing the power and potential of Android through the ease of the Android Things platform,” Melissa Daniels, a program manager at Android Things, told Digital Trends. “These demos also demonstrate the on-device processing power that makes Android Things unique.”

The HandBot robot is built using the Android Things developer kit, servos, and some custom cut acrylic. The palm of the hand contains five servos which move the fingers, and one servo for the wrist. The base, meanwhile, contains two more servos for forearm movement and other electronics such as an LED ring, PicoBoard, and the camera.

If you’re interested in creating a HandBot of your own, you can access all the open-sourced code on github and hackster.io, along with instructions for building it. The parts should set you back around $490, plus the price of an Android Things starter kit. The estimated build time is around seven hours, meaning that — provided you’ve got all the pieces — you should have no trouble building this over a weekend.

Sure, it’s probably not going to be the most useful gadget you’ve got on your shelf, but it’s a pretty neat way to dust off your engineering skills, while learning a bit of Tensorflow machine learning in the process. You can’t say fairer than that!

Editors' Recommendations

Your Google Home smart speaker can now make phone calls for you
Google Home

There are a number of features that make Google Home awesome but perhaps one of the biggest announced at Google I/O was the ability for Home to make phone calls. On Wednesday, that feature is finally rolling out to Google Home owners -- meaning you can now ask Assistant to call both people from your contacts and businesses.

The feature goes beyond simply being able to call companies by name. As Google notes in its press release, you could instead ask Assistant to "call the nearest florist," making the feature much more convenient for those who might not know the names of all the nearest businesses.

Read more
Cosy, a robotics startup, can track your position in 3D space with a camera
cosy 3d tracking mothers day grocery

Three-dimensional depth tracking is a complicated problem without an easy solution. Solutions like Microsoft's Kinect, Google's Tango platform, and Leap Motion's peripheral can pick out walls and other obstacles with the help of custom sensor arrays, but they aren't exactly plug-and-play -- short of some duct tape and a lot of coding, getting them to talk to a robot, smartphone, or other device is an ordeal.

But Cosy, a startup founded by University of Pennsylvania graduate Jonas Cleveland, might have the solution -- a software framework that combines neural networking and indoor positioning to pinpoint the location of robots, smartphones, and more in three-dimensional space.

Read more
Meet Stan, a robot that can pick up your car and park it for you
stan robot park car stanley robotics

Stan is a robot that makes the process of parking your car a whole lot easier. Because it does it for you.

Built by French firm Stanley Robotics, the clever wheel-based contraption takes your vehicle from you at the parking lot entrance before transporting it to an available space.

Read more