Stringman Household Crane Robot

A cable driven parallel robot with a single gripper neatly avoids the navigational problems of a cluttered household environment by hanging from the ceiling and moving out of the way when not in use. Four anchor points give it nearly complete access to any rectangular space, and four camera angles from which to locate itself, identify, and prioritize targets. It can grip and raise up to a 2kg object and drop it in a bin, such as a laundry hamper or trashcan. Pressure sensors are used to adapt grip pressure to the item being carried, and a 5th camera on the gripper assists with object homing.
 

The singular goal of this robot is to save you time on household chores. Though the software is still in an early stage of development, My objective is for you to be able to turn on this robot, leave, come back in an hour or two and find clear floors. Assuming of course the kids are not in the room at the time, then there’s no force under heaven that could keep it clean.

The control panel is a 3D game like program that manages autonomous movement and target selection. You can manually direct the location of the gripper, select from pre-identified targets, or enable fully autonomous clutter pickup. The control panel must run on a decent computer on the same LAN, though it does not require an Nvidia GPU. I do not yet offer a cloud based control panel.

The basic structure is four "anchors" modules, and a gripper module. the anchors consist of nema 17 servos and raspberry pi camera modules. These anchors are secured to the studs in the corners of your room. The anchors have a crown molding like cover. From these hangs a "gantry" by nearly invisible 50lb test braided fishing line, and an unfortunately somewhat more visible 30awg silicone wire. from the gantry hangs the gripper, powered by the wire from one of the anchors. It has no battery and there is no need to ever charge any component of this robot. The gripper can move vertically from the gantry, allowing the gantry to stay out of your way, most of the time. The gripper is also based on a raspberry pi, with a variety of sensors, and 35kg.cm Injora servo motors. (these motors exceeded the strength to weight ratio of 7 other tested models by a healthy margin).

Build Guides https://nhnifong.github.io/neufangled-site-2/

Video of movement 

BOM https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kLsbVjql81v7XJIGpkoWXCpJR9cWpTetd8mgG_NxFNU/edit?usp=sharing

CAD document https://cad.onshape.com/documents/35e8d1e03abf98b58e74f66a/w/bc460944b48052c6d5d7e7e0/e/b09532249639842fe724bbc1?renderMode=0&uiState=67ec156f6bfe9559a09be3d5