Posted February 24, 2012 by Chris

“Several years ago when I had the nerve to blow money on such things, I attempted to build a ’68 Volkswagen Beetle for The DARPA Grand Challenge. During that time I thought it would be fun to convert an RC car for self-guided operation. I bought the car from RadioShack for maybe $30, tore it apart, and promptly forgot about it completely.”

Posted February 21, 2012 by Chris

“I decided to build an autonomous flying robot about three years ago. I’ve converted RC cars to autonomous operation, so I thought that an RC helicopter might be a good place to start. I quickly discovered that the standard helicopter design would probably be too unstable in flight for my simple navigational and programming skills – but in searching the web I stumbled across the four rotor electric helicopter platform…and I was hooked!”

Posted February 20, 2012 by Chris

“I had a project which needed to have a lot of microcontrollers programmed. Surely I would have gone crazy if I had to go through and do each MCU by hand: program, encrypt, check, remove the MCU, No Way! This is mindless robot work. Thus this intelligent piece of aluminum, single-pass through, with five servo motors, and a little PCB sheet was born and the microcontroller burning robot came to be. ”

Posted February 18, 2012 by Chris

“Even in its “natural” state the OWI Edge Robot Arm is a pretty interesting toy. It comes with DC motors and a cable switch box that allows you to manually control 1) Grip, 2)Wrist, 3) Elbow, 4) Shoulder, and 5) Base. Prices for the unit are typically less than $40. The greatest thing about the OWI Edge Robot Arm is that you assembly it yourself so you understand it well and it is easy to customize.”

Posted February 14, 2012 by Chris

“A plywood chassis is equipped with the cutting motor attached to a inox 300 x 25 x 1.5 mm metal plate. There are 4 x 12 V reductor motors, each one equipped with a children toy wheel. An internal 12V 4Ah Dryffit rechargeable battery power it. A front bumper (in wood and gray plastic) can move and actuate 2 switches: when robots meets an obstacle, it can avoid it. Hard to program microprocessor? complex computer? No! just few relays: simple and no bugs!”

Posted February 12, 2012 by Chris

“The robot has two independently controled, electric-powered front wheels and two caster wheels at the rear. The sensors are: Two “bumblebee” 1024×768 color stereo camera pairs mounted on the mast, providing a 110 degree field of view. A 6-degree of freedom IMUs wheel encoders, and a GPS for pose estimation. A front bumper with left and right switch sensors. Two short-range infrared sensors that can detect obstacles up to 1.5 meters away.”

Posted February 4, 2012 by Chris

“In order to move around without becoming stuck or damaged, a robot needs to monitor and respond to its environment. This ability is made possible by sensors triggering certain navigational responses. The sensor robot project has two challenges: You will add a front sensor that will keep the robot from bumping into walls and objects in its path and you will program the robot to execute an avoidance maneuver in response to each sensor.”

Posted 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.”

Posted 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.”

Posted 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.”