I’ve managed to complete 1 sensor board for the build 18 project. The basic idea of the sensor board its to let the robots figure out their relative positions. The sensor board consists of 5 IR emitter/detector pairs. The basic idea is one robot will turn on its IR emitters and the other robots will use their dtectors to figure out their relative position based on which detector registers seeing the IR.
The sensor board is based, in concept, on the one found here: http://ipvs.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/BV/swarmrobot/tikiwiki-1.9.2/tiki-index.php?page=sbII . However, our sensor board uses only 5 IR emitter/detectors and we do not use ours for communication, only for relative positioning.
We plan to have at least 2 of these working, hopefully 4 in total.
Here is a gallery of images from the construction of the board:
[nggallery id=6]
Building robots is expensive. Motors $20, controller $20, motor driver $20, sensors $10, battery $10. Just the basic components and you’re already up to $80. The costs add up fast and it’s hard to pour a lot of money into building a lot of robots. That’s one reason why it’s great to have a resource like the Robotics Club. If I wanted, I could walk in and build a complete robot with parts that are already there. All I would have to invest is time, no money (well, a $25 membership fee, but that’s beside point).
Because building robots is expensive, for now I’m going to be focusing on projects that don’t require funding or that I have funding for already. I’m going to focus on Mobot (which I have almost all of the parts for), Micro-Colony (which I’m getting funded through the Build18 project), StairBot (a robotics club project I’m the head of, I’ll keep updated on its status as I work on it), and some other projects that I have in mind.
Unfortunately, I’m pushing Desk Rover to the side for the time being. Mainly because my robot fund is a little short of the price tag of desk rover, and I have plenty of other robots to work on in the meantime. I will build the first stage (chassis, sensors, motors, etc. no LCD or wireless) once I have enough money.
I will continue to work on the FWR3 Jasper. Most of the work in it is design work as of now, and that doesn’t cost anything but time (which, I now have a lot of as I’m on break).
I am planning on participating in Carnegie Mellon University’s Build18 event (http://build18.org/). The week long event is hosted by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The idea behind the event is to promote electronics tinkering. I’m going to be working together with Derek Kozel (http://www.derekkozel.com/).
Derek and I are going to attempt to build a colony of micro-robots. These robots will be approximately 2in x 2in x 2in. We plan to build at least 4 of them. These robots will be able to communicate with both wireless and infrared beams.
These robots will also be equipped with solar cells which will allow them to recharge themselves. Our goal behind this micro-colony is to have the robots work together to find the brightest spot, the location where they will be able to recharge most effectively.
I’ve wanted to build a colony of small robots for some time, after having read about this one: http://swarmrobot.org/. I’m really looking forward to the even and the chance to build this colony.
Friday we had our final design competition for our dynamics project. Our mechanism performed very well and we scored 115 out of 100. We didn’t perform perfectly, but, before Friday we had been operating our mechanism with two people. Friday we found out that only 1 person was allowed to operate the machine. Oh well, I was able to operate it and we got our A. All’s well that ends well.
Today I found out that CMU’s RoboClub’s Colony robots have encoders which could be used for the Jasper platform. The colony robots use the same motors and wheels that Jasper will use. The encoders are magnetic (not optical). This will save me a lot of development.
I still need to do a lot of development with the board. But, the robotics club might have PCB fab supplies which would speed things up greatly. I need to talk to some club members to see what we have.