Class

Robin Hewitt on "vision-based roadside direction sign recognition".

 

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Business

upcoming classes

April: Leaf microcontroller (Alex Brown)

May: Sensors and Arduino (Thomas Messersmidt)

Contests

April: pick-up-the-can

June: Hallway contest

August: RoboMagellan 

Treasury report: $500

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Contest

This month, we held a line-following contest. Here's the scoop ...

 

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Show & Tell

Make Magazine holds a robot building contest, sponsored by Jameco.

 

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Martin Laroque demonstrated an application: Visual GPS. He positioned his RoboMagellan, which is equipped with a GPS, robot near the window and showed the output of the program.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

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Jim talked about an interesting material called PVDF, a piezo-electric polymer which is used in thin film stress sensors. It behaves like a capacitor (about 400 pF) and has a mechanical resonance around 200Hz. It can be used as a microphone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jim is interested as a slip sensor for robot hands. He demonstrated a quick-and-dirty way where he mounts sensors between a wooden and some velcro. He then hooks these up to a circuit like this one:

 

 

He uses 2 of these sticks to pick up an object. When the object slips, it creates a pulse of approx 1 second.

This can also be used to detect wheel slip on your robot. When wheels slip, increase the speed to the adjacent wheel.

The group discussed alternative materials like sandpaper and pink packing foam.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rainer Hessmer  read the book "Probabilistic Robotics" by Sebastian Thrun from Stanford University, who leaded the team to win the DARPA Grand Challenge. This link leads you to an article that gives more in-depth details about his presentation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Thomas Messersmidt showed us the rollerblades for his Betty9 android:

  

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Jimmie Sypolt showed us his Leaf robot base, called ENZO.

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Ed Lebouthillier showed us some of the robots he worked on:

Here he shows his biped, called Gnomebot, which he built from scratch, based on the VStone Robovie-X robot.

  

Here is a robot base he started a while ago, and is revamping to turn in a base for experimenting with vision-based navigation. He made this base out of aluminum to give him a chance to experiment with welding aluminum. He plans to use an ARM-based embedded Linux board and using dual webcams.

 

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Tim Lewis showed us the Talking Elvis robot head from Wowwee, which he is taking apart and developing a controller board for it: