Results of diagnostic tests on Spirit’s right-rear wheel on Sol 2109 (Dec. 8, 2009) continue to indicate a troubled wheel, which may leave the rover with only four operable wheels. The Sol 2109 plan included a check of the grind motor of Spirit’s rock abrasion tool (RAT) because it shares the same motor controller as the right-rear wheel. It also included rotor resistance tests on the right-rear motor at three temperatures using opposite voltage polarity from earlier tests, backward and forward commanded motion of the right-rear wheel, and a check of rotor resistance on all other operating wheels. The RAT motor appears okay, although a more exhaustive test will be tried later. Continue reading
Category Archives: Robot worldwide
WISE Launch Delayed 24 Hours
Liftoff of a Delta II rocket and its NASA payload, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), has been delayed 24 hours. At the soonest, launch now will be Saturday, Dec. 12, during a launch window that extends from 6:09:33 to 6:23:51 a.m. PST (9:09:33 to 9:23:51 a.m. EST). The delay allows the launch team additional time to troubleshoot a technical issue. During final systems checks of the Delta II rocket Wednesday in preparation for flight, an anomaly in the motion of a booster steering engine was detected. Continue reading
Model Railroad on the Internet
If you want to put your robot on the Web I recommend you take a look at some interactive devices on the Internet. A good first stop is the University of Ulm’s model railroad. When you visit their Web site, you are entered into a queue of people who may issue a command to one of two Schnell Zugs and / or leave a message to the other operators. Second, issue your command (by clicking on a train and a destination) and sit back to wait. Continue reading
RoboSim
Wanna fun robot simulator? I recommend you download a robot simulator from Luiz Felipe Rudge Encarnacao. It includes an untethered mobile gripper with 5 degrees of movement in a 3-D room of objects and a toy airplane flying around in the same room. This is a Windows program that runs well on a Pentium and doesn’t lose its usefulness on a double speed 486. Continue reading
The Micromouse Contest
The micromouse competition is to build a small mobile robot that can solve a standardised maze. The competition has been running for over 25 years and is popular in the UK, USA, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia and elsewhere. This “maze solving” contest was designed to challenge graduate electronic engineers. 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
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
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