Jul 11, 2009

Meeting Date: 
Saturday, July 11, 2009

These minutes are also available in PDF format.

CLASS

Intro to SolidWorks by John Walters.

BUSINESS MEETING

Upcoming Classes

August:       Driver of the Mars Rover  remote navigation by JPL John Wright

September:  Modeling biped locomotion by Martin our company president

October:      Building A.L.I.C.E. chatbot with Thomas Messerschmidt

November:  Animatronics by Tim Louis

December:  TBD

Upcoming Contests

  • August:       Soda Can Pickup (RC and Autonomous)

· September:  Labyrinth

  • October:      Robo-Magellan
  • November:  TBD
  • December:  (None)

Other Upcoming Events

  • September:  RSSC Pot Luck
  • December:  Talent Show

 

CONTEST

Hallway Competition (Level 1, 2, and 3)

read all about it here.

Level 1

Robot              Contestant                              Distance

Rocky              Alex Brown                            3.25”
Ron-bot           Ron                                         29”
Vexy               Thomas Messerschmidt           51”

Level 2

Alex demo’ed part two, wall following. (No competition.)

Level 3

Alex demo’ed part three, stopping at way points. (No competition.)

Level 4

Ron Rose demo’ed part four, finding targets on the floor.

Congratulations to the Winners!

  • 1.First Place:                                               Rocky- Alex Brown
  • 2.Second Place:                                           Ron-bot – Ron Rose
  • 3.Third Place:                                             Vexy - Thomas Messerschmidt

 

SHOW AND TELL

Dr. Bruce demo’ed RoboRealm’s new fiducial modeling software. fiducials: land marks that the robot can identify easily. He also demo’ed the free graphing software package Graph. (www.padowan.dk)

 

Anouk showed her solar powered Attacking Inchworm robot.

 

 

Bob Huss demo’ed his robot called LINK for next month’s can pickup contest

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robin expressed her distaste for the intricacies of the mechanical aspects of robots, and the inherent need for all dimensions of sold components to be just right to get any kind of movement. She got intrigued by a new toy robot Keepon, and its ability to express complicated movements consisting of not much more than foam. She showed us a yellow foam block she is trying to figure out how to convert that into a Keepon-like interactive robot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For those of you that do no know what a Keepon robot is, here is a video:

 

 

Russ demo’ed his Big Blue robot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Messerschmidt demonstrated his Alive Elvis mods and his robot arm that he will use in the pick up the can contest.