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.”

Posted 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.”

Posted 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.”

Posted 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.”

Posted 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.”