Robot World

Hello folks. It’s been a while since my last post – almost 6 months! But I’m here again with another update, at last. It’s been a busy time (I think all my posts start like that, lol) but it really has. I took on a contract job in February (got to pay the bills!) which has me working at a clients 9-5 Monday – Friday, which has drastically cut down my time available for developing the robots. But I’ve managed to make some progress, none the less. In this post I’m going to describe the next step in my robot’s evolution – constructing a map of its environment. What that means is that the robot moves around as before, using an ultrasonic sensor to avoid obstacles, but this time, as the robot moves around, it plots its position, and the position of obstacles, on a map which can be displayed on a PC screen. How it knows its position is by using odometry and the magic of mathematics (my maths tutor was right, it has come in useful after all! Lol). For an

Hi folks. It’s been a busy time with one thing and another, but with Christmas now only days away I thought I’d get one more post in before it. Unfortunately I was thwarted in my attempt by my video camera breaking down. Never the less I have soldiered on and used my 'phone to shoot the video. This proved to be rather more time consuming as I don't have a tripod mount & remote control for it like I do for the video camera, so I had to do things several times over, pick the best (i.e. least shaky) bits and edit them together to get one decent stretch of video, but here we are now :-) . Last time I posted about fitting sensors to a cheap Maplin / OWI robot arm to give feedback on what angle each of the joints was at. In this post I am going to describe the other side of the operation, driving the motors. Getting ready to drop a building brick into a cup after picking it up from the the rectangle in the bottom left of the 'photo. . You may recall from