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Custom I2C Servo Motor Controller

January 31, 2012 by Chris
“This is the servo controller for my robot. It uses a MC33887 H-Bridge chip to power the motor, an Atmega88 as the contoller, and an I2C interface. It was designed to be the motion drive for a robot, but being a servo drive with position feedback, I will probably use it to rotate and elevate the turret, and possibly use it for the sonar movement.”

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Tic-Tac-Toe Playing Robotic Arm

January 23, 2012 by Chris
“Our project is a twenty four and half inch aluminum frame robotic arm with four degrees of freedom. In our project we made the arm the second player in the classic game of Tic-Tac-Toe to demonstrate its repeatable motion. The arm consists of five servo motors, four to control the motion and one to control the end effecter (gripper). The arm moves tic-tac-toe pieces onto a board for its opponent and itself to give the user interactive control over the arm.”

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Toy Car Inverted Pendulum Balancer

January 21, 2012 by Chris
“The inverted pendulum balancer is a radio controlled car modified by adding a plexiglass platform and an inverted pendulum with free rotating pivot. The electrical component of the balancer brings together computational hardware (Atmel Mega32 MCU), an input angle sensor (US Digital Optical Encoder), and an output motor driver (NI LMD18200 H-Bridge) onto a single board whose sole purpose is to autonomously control the motion of the car in order to keep the pendulum from falling.”

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Unibot – 3D Stabilization

January 18, 2012 by Chris
“The Unibot is a self balancing unicycle robot. This robot combines the principles of the famous wheeled inverted pendulum and inertia wheel pendulum. A well known application of the wheeled inverted pendulum is the Segway. The wheel on the ground is used to establish the stabilization in the y-z-plane. The wheel in the air is used to balance the robot in the x-z-plane.”

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Areoquad: The Open Source Quadcopter

January 13, 2012 by Chris
“AeroQuad hardware typically consists of an Arduino MCU as the flight controller board and an AeroQuad shield with various sensors, such as an accelerometer and gyroscope. AeroQuad software is written in C and uploaded to the MCU via the Arduino IDE. It currently supports an Acrobatic Mode that uses only the gyroscope for flight assistance, and a Stable Mode that uses the gyroscope and accelero-meter for leveled flight assist.”

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PIC18F Based Line-Follower

January 10, 2012 by Chris
“This was a second-year Embedded Systems Application Project at university. We were given the hardware and after assembling the robot, had to write firmware for it. The PIC MCU programming was done in C. As it was the first time this course was run, objectives were not concrete and were updated as students progressed. Some of the objectives were: follow a line, go over a ramp and memorize a track.”

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Research: Making Robots Walk Like Humans

January 4, 2012 by Chris
“A simple Atmel microcontroller runs the high-level state machine that integrates simple sensor data and dictates behaviour of the motors and latches. Simple electrical relays (right side) act between the microcontroller and high-power electromechanical components.”

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Open Automation Project

December 13, 2011 by Chris
“The purpose of this project is to engineer modular software and electronic components, from which it is possible to assemble an intelligent mobile robot suitable for home/office environments. This project aims to fill the gap between the powerful mobile robot platforms typically used by researchers, and the small rug-roving robots with limited processing power that are popular with hobbyists.”

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Wall-Climbing Ceiling-Walking Robot

December 5, 2011 by Chris
“The goal of this project is to construct a digital controller for a w all climbing micro-robot. There are two kind of wall-climbing micro-robots in the lab. One is called 'Flipper', the other is called 'Crawler'. The restrictions such as small size, light weight and low power consumption must be complied when designing the miniature robot.”

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iPhone controlled Solar Powered Arduino Tank

October 3, 2011 by Chris
“Using the super awesome TouchOSC app for the iPhone connected to Processing for converting Open Sound Control signals into serial commands send out via USB to an Xbee...I am able to drive a small tank.”

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