I managed to get a gallery of a step-by-step build of the MicroColony/Build18 sensor board uploaded. This post details the sensor board itself a bit better.
We plan on building a better one that uses a multiplexor to allow us to have more than 5 sensors on the board.
During Build 18 I managed to slap together a simply chassis for our micro colony robots. It was super simple, made of some plastic and hot glue, but, it was able to hold everything on it.
Here are some pictures:
As you can see it isn’t very big, not much larger than my cell phone. I used 3 4-40 machine screws which let us slide the sensor board into place and tuck all of the electronics underneath. I really like the 4-40 screws for stacking feature and it is something I would like to retain for the next revision of our chassis.
The next revision will also have a mount for the servos, instead of them just being tacked in place with hot glue. It was a quick and dirty build, but, it got the job done.
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.