The Home Brew Robotics Club, has a tabletop challenge, and our founding member Andrew unashamedly adapted their idea to local conditions. The goal is to build a tabletop robot, that can drive around a Science Alive table without falling off the table, and locate a 2x2 inch box. Once it has found the box, it needs to push it down to one end of the table and into a shoebox. The eventual goal of this challenge is to get working robots, in the club, that could be used for 1 on 1 tabletop soccer.
The challenge has 3 phases:
Stay on the table without falling off while turned on and moving.
Locate the box on the table and push it off without falling off yourself.
Locate the box, and push it into a shoe box (goal) at one end.
Last Updated ( Thursday, 21 August 2008 )
Micromouse
Written by Hanno
Tuesday, 06 November 2007
Micromouse Challenge at ChchRobotics
The truth is that we don't have any functioning micromouse robots at the moment. Nevertheless a number of us in Christchurch are keen, and once we have one functioning mouse more will surely breed. We have a portion of maze which is handy for testing designs. I'll bring this along to each session, and when the need arises we'll see about procuring enough maze to run a New Zealand competition. (Any suggestions about how to buy, borrow or make a maze would be welcome). With no robots to compete against each other here are the challenges that we can run for individual mice learning their way towards maze solving.
1. Fastest lap time around an arbitrary sized maze rectangle.
2. Wall following to the centre of a simply connected maze.
3. Random maze exploration.
4. Full Maze solving.
Details of the micromouse competition rules, design ideas and alogorithms are widely available on the Internet. See our Links and Pictures sections.
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 14 November 2007 )
Wednesday 19th December 2007
Written by Hanno
Friday, 28 December 2007
The final meeting of the year attracted over 30 people, another record turn out with lots of new faces and an age range from 6 to, well I was too polite to ask. We are still fortunate to be able to use the Science Alive facilities and I was pleased to be able to give them a record gold coin collection of $38.90. Thanks for your donations, they are appreciated. I have booked the Science Alive Seminar Room for the third Wednesday of every even numbered month for 2008, but do check out our new site http://kiwibots.orgjust in case of any late changes. I had a wonderful time, very educational, thought provoking and many of us found it hard to leave. Thanks to everyone for coming.
Attending Robots and Topics
Peter Harris brought along his prototype robotic lawn mower again. Much changed since its last appearance, it has lost a lot of weight, acquired some very business like grass stains and under radio control gave us a good idea of its agility and speed. Thankfully its cutting blade made of a hacksaw blade was removed during the demonstration so no damage was done by those fortunate enough to be trusted to give it a try.
Eric Cummins bought along a mysterious shoe box and gave us a very entertaining talk about his experiences developing robotic walking legs, foraging in car yards for parts and applications for the disabled. The highlight was when Eric opened the shoe box and took out a pair of precision made robotic legs with torso that walked along the table, and with a slight of hand could be made to walk around corners. Eric has a DVD of his robotic adventures which hopefully we will be able to play at the next session.
Hanno Sander spoke about the Parallax Propellor processor used in his Dance robot. The processor is a tiny 44 pin device which has 32k words of RAM and eight parallel 32bit CPUs clocked at up to 80MHz delivering staggering performance and some very unusual programming characteristics. Hanno demonstrated how to program the device and execute code written in assembler or the built in Spin interpreted language. He also showed us his ViewPort programming environment. The ViewPort environment turns a PC running Windows connected to the propellor on a demo board into a 32 channel logic state analyser, with support for video and fuzzy logic. It is all nicely explained in this video: http://mydancebot.com/viewport/videos.php Hanno obtained four Proto boards from Parallax that were offered free to anyone prepared to bring them along to the next session with a working application. A number of names went into the hat and the lucky winners were: Carl Ranson, Andrew McDoughall, Rob Haughy and Richard Jones (honest it was all above board).
All told a very lively and interesting session. If I’ve missed anything or corrections are required just email the group. Thanks to all who came, and for the Christmas fayre eats that we enjoyed.
Next Meeting Our next meeting will be on Wednesday 20th February 7.30pm Seminar Room. Hopefully this will be a lively meeting with lots of moving robots, four working propellor demos and maybe a DVD of robotic legs. See you there!
