Feb 14, 2009
These minutes are also available in PDF format.
Meet, Greet, and Build
Once again there were doughnuts provided by Don Fears. Thanks Don!!!
Class
Alex Brown presented a class on creating a mobile robot base. He talked about the need to keep it from falling over by analyzing different bases’ center of gravity. He said that round bases were more prone to tipping over than square or rectangular bases.
Business Meeting
• Treasurer’s report: $495.45 in the club account.
• It was motioned that the club look into generating extra money through affiliate links programs such as Amazon.com and Ebay.com.
• There was a call for suggestions for future competitions. Thomas Messerschmidt suggested a “Get a soda” contest where a robot arm would locate and lift an empty aluminum can off of a card table.
Contest
Mini Sumo Robot Competition: There were 12 competitors in the competition and the pushing was fierce.
Read all about in this article.
Show and Tell
Anouk Mangelschots demo’ed her “Little Bear” walking robot made with an Ollo robot kit.
• Thomas Messerschmidt showed off the improvements that he made on his robot hand – 5 finger articulation (4 more than last time).
• Alex Brown presented Rocky II – His new no-tip-over robot base. It uses motors that he demo’ed last month.
Robin Hewitt gave a demonstration on face tracking with minimal cpu cycles. Here is an article about that topic in Cognotics. Here is an paper she wrote about the subject.
• Alex Brown presented a Murata LSST/10 10 amp SIP DC/DC converter (up to 51 watts) that is 93% efficient.
Professor Martin demo’ed a Vexplorer base, driving RoboRealm on a PC by RC. It uses a Sparkfun 5 DOF ($109) which consists of a 3 axis accelerometers and 2 gyros. An Arduino board reads the accel/gyro and then averages 10 data points and sends to PC via a serial port.