While watching the Truck and Tractor Pull on TV and singing along with the commercials, some people from Seattle thought. What did they think? Even they don’t remember. But at some point the age-old instincts for competition, power — and yes, beer — came to the fore of their discussion. For some reason, TV lost its appeal, food seemed unnecessary, and even the joy of gardening dimmed to a shadow of its former self as these primal instincts became forever etched in their minds. Continue reading
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Autonomous Finally Faster
The Robot Wars community justifiably thinks that autonomous robots are slow. Not so. You see, previous autonomous entries used notebook computer brains. Camp Peavy’s Gladiator Rodney used a 386SX with DOS 6.22, programmed in GW-BASIC; same as he did to win the autonomous face-off in 96. But this year he’s wielding an electric chain saw and a 1000 watt DC to AC inverter to run the 750 watt Sears chain saw. Continue reading
1997 ROBOT WARS
Pretty Hate Machine’s offensive saws stalled while chewing on Ziggy’s metal armor. Being standard (hand-pull) gas-powered weed eater motors, they could not be restarted during the match. Jon Ridder’s Ziggy was fortunate not to have turned off.TIP: Other bots also lost controls in the ring. If your bot doesn’t restart its own functions, then put those features onto RC control. (Personally, I’d like more bots to use proprioception. That is, where the robot senses what’s happening to itself.) Continue reading
Cycler The Robot
Cycler runs his own inbuilt personality program which makes him look around, move his head and arms, move and illuminate his eyes in various sequences and generally look alive. This personality program enables his handler to have both hands free and in view.Cycler has five microcontrollers for his brain, six electric motors, an MP3 sound file player and an amplifier and speakers which allow him to talk to an audience of around 200 children at a time. Cycler’s lips illuminate in synchronism with the speaking and singing voice which is stored on an MP3 player. Continue reading
Robot: Mutant Machines
Mutant Machines is a Television series shown on the Granada Men and Motors satellite channel. It is Scrapheap Challenge meets Combat Cars. Two teams of three people were given the task of creating a powerful, useful, motoring related machine from two or more donor machines. One challenge was to make a four wheel drive, four wheel steering car from two front wheel drive cars. The teams then had to run a race and a manoevreability contest. Another contest was to use a car to make a fast beer can crusher. Continue reading
Mutant Machines
Mutant Machines is a Television series shown on the Granada Men and Motors satellite channel. It is Scrapheap Challenge meets Combat Cars. Two teams of three people were given the task of creating a powerful, useful, motoring related machine from two or more donor machines. One challenge was to make a four wheel drive, four wheel steering car from two front wheel drive cars. The teams then had to run a race and a manoevreability contest. Another contest was to use a car to make a fast beer can crusher. Continue reading
World’s Best Robot
The most difficult type of robot to design and build is a humanoid or android (unless you use very large feet). The Honda Motor Company in Japan started research on biped (two footed) walking in 1986 producing the famous prototypes P1, P2, P3 and now Asimo. The latest, July 2005, Asimo (so far only seen in Japan) can run, momentarily lifting both feet off the ground on each step. Honda are continuing their research and consider that in 15 to 20 years time they will have added sufficient intelligence to the robot to enable it to learn from its environment. Continue reading
A Stable Hopping Leg
Robert Ringrose of MIT demo’ed a very cool design at AAAI97. His Hopper robot leg stands on its own, and, when activated, hops straight up and down, maintaining its balance. It corrects its balance if you shove it to one side. It can be adjusted to hop forward, backward left, right, etc., simply by changing its center of gravity. The hopper will move in the direction of its mass.This robot needs no brain. It is stabilized by physics. Hopping is a very stable motion. The rotary motion of the motor is turned into a sinusoidal motion which is in series with the spring. Continue reading
The motors in most small robots aren’t very picky about their power source
slap a hurking battery on the frame and your motors will do the rest. But your microcontroller (MCU) needs a much better power supply if you want decent performance. Here are some tips to keep your ‘bot and its brain happy. First, pick the right battery. For larger machines, where the battery is usually set deep inside the robot’s guts, choose a lead-acid gel-cell battery. They are cheap on the surplus market, take plenty of recharge cycles, and provide a fairly good power to weight ratio. Continue reading
Finally set your ‘bot on the floor for its first test run
Chances are the problem lies with your power system. When motors start up, they require much more current than they use once they’re running. The battery will try its best to satisfy this bigger power requirement, but something has to give. In many cases, that “something” is the battery’s output voltage, which can sag so low that the robot’s MCU resets itself. Even worse, the MCU sometimes doesn’t reset cleanly, and “runs away,” executing garbage data from your EPROM. Continue reading