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Robot Lab
Introduction
As long as I can remember, I've been thinkering with stuff; it started with taking apart toys and later on trying to put them back together as well. One thing, robots have always fascinated me ... I always wanted to build one, but never found the time or the right ideas to build one. Some years ago, I started building my first small robot and now it has grown out to a bit more as a simple hobby. I got the idea of creating a small robot that would be easy to build, use and develop software for, hence, the robot lab was founded ...
I started to use this site as a way to show some of the hardware projects I've been involved in. Take a look, and maybe you encounter something you find usefull or amusing ...
The original idea ...
The purpose of the robot lab was to develop a cheap tabletop autonomous vehicle for my own desktop A.I. research. My goal was (is) to study autonomous vehicles without the need to invest in an expensive robot platform.
Specifications
These are the (preliminary) design goals of the small robot.
- COTS components ( common of the shelves ).
- Powered by an 8-bit RISC processor
- 8Kb RAM, 512 bytes RAM, 512 bytes EEPROM
- Stepper or DC motors
- Modular sensory system: light, touch, Ir
- Short range (Ir) and long range (Radio) communications
- Program in BASIC, C (gcc) or Assembly
Robot Prototypes
I have made some prototypes, most of them run on a subsumption architecture, pioneered by R. Brooks. The walker uses nitinol as actuators and runs from a simple CPG (Central Pattern Generator) programmed into an AT902313.
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