Building A Ceiling-Based Crane Robot To Keep A Room Clean | Hackaday

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One of the joys you get to experience whether as a proud parent or pet owner is that a lot of things get left around haphazardly. You could of course pick every piece of discarded clothing, half-destroyed toy and detritus yourself, but as a parent of three children himself [Nathaniel Nifong] opted to use his engineering background to potentially over engineer a wires-suspended robotic claw to do this picking up for him.

What he calls Stringman robots requires an anchoring point at four corners of a room, after which the robotic crane can then scour across the ceiling, identify targets to pick up and move these to predesignated drop-off points. It’s an open source project with the LeRobot-based firmware available on GitHub in addition to build instructions for the physical hardware. There’s also a pilot run of ready to use hardware and kits for those who want to trial it, but aren’t interested in building it themselves via [Nathaniel]’s company website.

The basic idea is that this crane can run for an hour or so and deal with the mess in its room without having to do anything yourself. The process isn’t perfect yet, of course, with the underlying diffusion transformer to implement machine vision requiring more refinement. The gripper itself struggles with objects like books, which can be a concern for parents and bookworms, and of course while the crane is operating the wires will dip down as a potential risk to anyone in the room.

Compared to an overhead crane like a traditional bridge crane this wire-suspension crane is probably more stable, but either is an interesting engineering challenge when applied to a household. Next it would probably also be cool if items could be put away where they belong instead of dropped into a bin, as so far that task will still be left to deal with by the adult humans.

22 thoughts on “Building A Ceiling-Based Crane Robot To Keep A Room Clean”

For another older take on this check out Scanlime’s TucoFlyer/Cam project: https://youtu.be/JU6omrP2iFU?si=DGoenQvspqSxzgah Much detail in the related videos and git repos — follow the breadcrumbs

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The github link is dead (as are many of the others).

Whatever happened to scanlime? I hope she and Tuco are doing well and simply off the internet.

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Yeah, she went silent on scanlime.org and youtube, livestream and twitch channels 4 years ago, but apparently still alive on mastodon at https://misc.name/@scanlime

Her git repos are at https://git.approximate.life/

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This is worthy of Wallace and Grommit.

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the underlying diffusion transformer to implement machine vision requiring more refinement.

That could be bad news for the baby!

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No, AI puts baby in the corner.

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Not to rain on your original parade…. But i have been developing an idea using NEMA driven spin casting reels to drive a Smart Phone gimbal gantry to use as a sort of PANAFLEX setup for video capture without a camera man.

Much of my thinking so far is in the idea, But… I have the four motor and the reels all in one spot and i run glide pulleys to mounting lugs on the very corner of the room, I found that if i kept the four in one place i could move it to another place much more simply. The one thing you will have to start thinking about is adding a rotary encoder wheel on the four drives to get precise position info on the four lines.

I was even looking for monofiliment with the black/clear pattern on it already… Not no luck on that.

I put my machine on the floor in the corner of the room and run lines up to pulley there to string out to the corner ones and then return to the pod winch…. I tend to keep the pod high at the celing and use the winch to lower the gantry to camera height… Pan and tilt on the gantry and a smartphone and a cam app you can get some pretty good pans from such a rig.

I was using the fishing reels in a base to allow it to be setup outside as well if the need came up for that.

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Sounds like the idea needs a little grounding, as they say.

NEMA is a standards organization, defining things like ratings for weatherproof enclosures and standard equipment mounting sizes. You mean some kind of motor?

Panaflex is a motion picture film camera.

Skycam/Cablecams are a pretty mature technology now. Lots can be learned from studying their designs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skycam

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The big long arm camera…. some have seats for an camera operator… Most just have a camera on a mount at the end…. It can telescope and pan real wide…

Formula1 use them in the big sweeping corners…. They also use the three line shuttle cameras….on the pit lanes….

That is where i got the idea to use nema stepper to run the spin casting reels….

Watching those shuttle pace the cars down the pit lane…....