Hackaday Europe 2026: Outdoors with Robots

Erin Kennedy has been building robots for over a decade now, with a focus on smaller bots that interact with, or maybe even clean up, the outdoor environment. Europe 2026: Outdoors with Robots. Still other bots are made to interact with people, and when the people are outside in the park, that’s where your robot needs to go.

Whatever the reason, Erin’s talk Europe 2026 is an invitation to take your projects out into the outdoors. But the great wide world outside of your lab is not necessarily the most friendly place for a little bot, and the other half of this talk is about practical design tips and lessons learned to help it survive. Environments She structures the talk around different environments, which gives her an opportunity to focus on her bot cleaning up plastic trash on the beach, but also to point out the absolute horrors that sand can work on robot motors.

She goes through several strategies for dealing with this, including going slow, keeping the motors as high up as you can, and designing the body of the robot to be full of holes and shed sand. Taking to the water, she demos Otter Force One, which aims to capture invasive sea urchins. But underwater means under pressure, and she gives us some good tips on how to get the cables out while keeping the water in – double-o-ring cable glands potted with marine epoxy.