[Mac Cody] has continued working on his original optical mouse hack. In the time since we first posted the story, he has repackaged the mouse’s sensor so that it can be used with any robotic platform. He built a custom board for the sensor and modified a lens package so that the sensor plane doesn’t have to be in contact with the ground. His work is based on a NASA paper Insect-inspired Optical-Flow Navigation Sensors. Mac’s sensor seems to be progressing nicely towards his goal of dead reckoning navigation, but he thinks it could do better if the LED illumination was more focused.

Continue reading “Cody’s Robot Optical Motion Sensor” →

[William] from GoRobotics.net sent along this tip about a tick destroying rover built by students at VMI. The truck uses inductive sensors to follow a wire laid around the perimeter of the lawn. By releasing CO2 along this strip of grass they can attract ticks into the area (animals expel CO2). The ticks collected are treated with Permethrin. Since the application is targeted, it is far safer and cheaper than spraying the entire lawn. The students also suggest that repeating the run over the course of three months would break the tick’s life cycle, making the area tick free for several years. Here’s Wolfgang’s write-up, test runs with video one and two, the associated paper, and the Wired article.

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The RoboMaid (warning sound) really has nothing robotic about it. The website proclaims “smart sensor technology” and “programmable”. It’s actually just a Weasel Ball in a cage. Reader [Perry Cain] decided to keep the cage and add some real electronic brains if the form of a Prallax kit. The robot has 5 IR pairs: 2 in front, 2 on the side and one in the back. He says it works pretty well, but he hasn’t added detection to keep it from going down the basement steps yet.

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Since he spends way too much time programming robots, Pavel Petrovic, felt he should delegate the task of walking his robot dog… to his other robot. No, that isn’t the real story, but there isn’t a lot of justification for the project besides it being a neat trick. LEGO IR tower support for WowWee bots had already been developed, but Pavel decided to try controlling the bots using the LEGO RCX. BrickOS provides direct control of the RCX’s IR port. Pavel’s program lets the simple LEGO bot issues commands to the RoboPet to lead it around the room. It works, but isn’t too reliable because there is no way for the RCX to determine the absolute position of the dog. Have a look at Pavel’s site to see videos of it in action.

[thanks Robert Oschler]

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The OSMC project was started in 1998 to provide a high quality H-bridge speed control to hobbyists and professionals. The original design was intended to be used by people who were building Battle Bots and other competition robots, but the line has expanded since then. The project embraces the open source spirit by making the plans freely available and encouraging modification. This is the same controller that Trevor Blackwell used in his Electric Unicycle.

[thanks monster]

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[Greg] has been doing a great job updating DIY Live. The latest entry details a line following robot. These bots are quite common, but Greg provides really thorough coverage of all of the details involved. His particular design features two separate sensors and when the robot reaches the end of the line it will reverse, retracing its steps. He’s got wiring schematics for the h-bridge and other components. He admits that PIC programming is a topic too broad for one post, but he does discuss a few of the necessary logic chunks involved.

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