Dec 08, 2007
These minutes are also available in PDF form.
Classroom
We had a very informative lesson by Brian O’Neal of TinMan Robotics (tinmanrobotics.com). The subject was how to use plastics to construct parts for our robots. He gave a nice overview of the types of plastics commonly available and their characteristics indicating which are most suitable for particular applications requiring machining, bending or gluing. He emphasized the use of ABS and styrene plastics.
He brought in heatguns and wood and clamps to make fixtures for bending and actually did some bending for the class. He also had a number of parts he had previously fabricated including a couple robot bodies and a prototype can gripper for use in the contest next month.
Business meeting
Our outgoing President, Bruce Weimer gave us a review of the activities our club has been involved with over the last year. He also treated the whole club to pizza for lunch.! Were we really unable to get him to run again?
We then moved on to the election of officers for the next year. These were hard fought races which often boiled down to the only person who volunteered for an office being elected by acclamation.
The winners (losers?) were:
Jim Ubersetzig as president
Walter Martinez as Vice president
Martin Mason as Secretary and Webmaster
Ron Rose as Treasurer.
Alex Brown will be giving a classroom session on laser range finders for January.
Contest
This month was Talent show contest. Find out more about that here.
Show and Tell
Walter Martinez showed us the new Vex robot which he got on Ebay. It has a gripper which he believes will be suitable for the can contest next month. But, it will be a challenge to adapt it to autonomous mode.
Martin Mason showed a model car which comes with a garage which also acts as a battery charger for the car. He has it interfaced to a laptop.
Dave Stoffen gave a presentation on the Pleo robot, available from Sharper image. This robot is intended to be an animatronic pet and has many behaviors.
Alex Brown gave a presention on the Hokuyo laser range scanner. It is capable of making a 240 degree scan every 100 milliseconds with a range reading every 0.35 degrees. It has a range of up to 5.6 meters.
He had it interfaced to a laptop which was taking the radial readings from each scan and displaying the data as an occupancy grid. He demonstrated how well it could detect nearby walls as well as doorways in the walls and smaller obstacles such as table legs.