Building a fire-fighting robot
I’ve been looking for a reason to build another robot. A few weeks ago I found a list of robot competitions around the world. Ignoring the battle bot options, geography and capability led to me to the Penn State Abington Fire-Fighting Robot Contest:
The objective of the fire-fighting robot contest is to design a computer-controlled robot [...]
Stanford and Sebastian Thrun offering more free online classes
I posted previously about the free AI class taught last fall by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. It was a marvelous experience. I learned quite a bit, and completed all the homework and tests, with a perfect score on the final exam (which was not terribly hard). Well worth the time investment. The video format [...]
Taking Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course
This week marks the beginning of Stanford’s introductory course in Artificial Intelligence, taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. This is the same course being given live at Stanford’s campus as CS221. Enrollment is free, and includes video lectures, quizzes, and (optionally) homework and exams. I have signed up for the full boat, they say [...]
Robotics Open House at the University of Maryland
Last Friday the University of Maryland had an open house for their robotics department. This was a free event, including lunch, and very well organized. I had not been able to go to any previous robot competitions at the university so I was eager to see what they had.
The university has 18 robotics labs, 16 [...]
Playing with a solar robot
Holly has been begging to build her own robot ever since I made Robie. Fortunately there are some excellent options for kid-friendly robot kits. After browsing the MakerShed we decided to get the 6-in-1 Educational Solar Robotic Kit.
This was a good choice. As the box states you can make six different robots. We’ve done three [...]
Robie the Robot lives!
A few days ago I put in the obstacle avoidance programming for the coasterbot. Almost immediately, he acquired a real personality. The algorithm works incredibly well. Even though the first version of my code had significant bugs — typos, forgetting that moving the sensor servo takes a finite amount of time, etc. — he was [...]
Coasterbot gets a pair of eyes
I was featured in MAKE Robot Dispatch #7 — thanks guys! Hard to believe that there is less than a week left in the contest.
One of the requirements of the contest is for the robot to do some obstacle avoidance. The Jameco bundle came with some switches to do bump sensing. While this might be [...]
Coasterbot moves!
With the electronics done, it was time to go back and work on the chassis. As before, the DVDs are linked with screws. I wanted the servos to be firmly attached. Since we removed the controller units, this left a lot of empty space in the case, allowing for this type of attachment:
I still don’t [...]
Robot Fest 2010
Today the family and I went to Robot Fest, held at the National Electronics Museum. I had been looking forward to this for a long time, and I wasn’t disappointed. There were any number of fun displays and workshops, including in no particular order: compressed-air rocket launches, Lego robots to control and build, a vocoder [...]
A nice coasterbot surprise
This morning, I got an e-mail from YouTube asking me to sign up for revenue sharing on my “popular video” of coasterbot folding. I didn’t think too much about this, because that was a 10 second video I shot one-handed. I hadn’t even bothered adding an audio track, or a link back here. The only [...]