2012 Indiana Robotics Invitational

Today I attended some of the 2012 Indiana Robotics Invitational.  It's a First  competition for students in grades 9-12.  Teams of about 40 students have 6 weeks to build a robot.  Then at competition two alliances of three teams each go up against each other in a points match.  As you can see in the picture this year's game is a version of basket ball where robots need to collect balls off the floor and shoot baskets.  At the beginning of each match the robots operate autonomously for 15 seconds, then are tele-operated for the rest of the match.  There were 70 some teams invited to compete this year, so it was very crowded and very busy, and uber cool.

Cheap Linear Actuator

The actuator in the video was built for about $13.00.  This price includes the H-bridge, motor, and all the mechanicals.  I've got eight of these to build for the Dorkbot Indy project I'm working on.

Newest Member of the Robot Collection

This little guy is about 45 mm square, and about 55 tall.  The software is still under development, but he scoots around - sort of avoiding light  - at this point.  The 8-pin chip is an ATTiny85.  I write code with the Arduino IDE and program it using my Arduino as an ISP.  After getting B.bro 1.0 to act like a Braitenberg vehicle I decided to see how cheap and small I could go.  With different motors I think I can get the size down to about 25 x 30 mm with a unit cost of about $4.00 in quantities of 50.  I want to build 50.

Braitenberg Vehicle Comes to Life

"Vehicles" by Valentino Braitenberg is one of my favorite books.  This version of the B.bro's software causes him to behave as a type 4a vehicle.  I was very surprised how stable the behavior is, and how well it adapts to changes.

B.bro 1.1 - light seeking upgrade

I got a little sick of working on my string based drawbot, so I decided to go back to the bot that started it all for me.  This is B.bro - named for the White Stripes song "Baby Brother".  In the last two days I've added analog light sensors to him, and written light seeking software to work with them.  I'm pretty pleased.  There's video of him running on YouTube.

All DrawBot Source and Design Files Available

I've finally created a github account, and uploaded all the source code and Eagle design files for the DrawBot. There's no documentation to go along with it yet, but that's coming.

Last bugs worked out

I've posted a couple of pictures for comparison. The first is an SVG file as rendered by Inkscape. The second one is a photo of the same SVG as drawn by my drawbot.