Category: Robots

Micro Sized Desktop Line Following Robot

Desktop robot

This little line follower moves at 53 cm/sec and only weighs 15 gm! Quite amazing.

Recently many kind of robot contests have being opened and some interesting reports of the challenge are found on the web. The Line Following is a kind of the robot contests to vie running speed on the line. I build a tiny line following robot which can run on the desk, moving the key board aside will do. It is for only a personal toy reduced its size less than one fifth compared to typical line following robots, not in formula. But I believe that it is suitable for home use in the small Japanese houses…

[via MAKE: Blog]
Desktop Line Following Robot

‘Wiardosebn’ Bird robot kit

Weird-7

A little pricey at US$300 but it does have a gob (9) of servos and does not require solder to assemble (?). Nifty! The body is built out of laser cut (just a guess there, but it would be cheap to do) plywood so it will be quite tough. I’m a little foggy on the controls though, looks like it’s either by an RS-232C/USB port or a UHF RF remote. It also looks like the head/beak acts as a pendulum.

Bird type self-made robot of wonder kit products and two walking “Weird-7”
“Weird-7” Homepage

Micro Self Guiding Flying Bot

30 gm plane

The automatic collision avoidance is pretty cool and it’s done with 1D cameras. Normal cameras are 2D – they see up/down and left/right. The 1 D cameras are just a row of CCD elements like in a scanner that see just left and right. A computer samples the cameras about 20 times a second and looks for high contrast marks that are moving. As they move faster it can be assumed that they are getting closer and so the plane avoids them by turning away.

It only weighs 30 grams for a 80-centimeter wingspan and can flow inside a building for about 4 minutes. With its two 1-gram cameras, a gyroscope, and a small microcontroller onboard, it can detect walls and automatically avoid collisions. The team is now working on even smaller versions of these flying robots which will be used for search-and-rescue, reconnaissance, and inspection applications.

A 30-gram Indoor Flying Robot

Scribbler Programmable Robot

scribbler

I found this on MAKE today. Not as expandable as the Boe Bot, but then again it’s price tag is lower. From the photos on the Scribblerrobot main page it looks as if the micro controller is not socketed, that’s a pity because it means you can’t replace the Basic Stamp with it’s pin-for-pin compatible ( and much more powerful) rival, the Basic X-24 – one look at the other chips specs and you will see what I bring this up. Still, if you on a budget and just want a simple robot to use as a basic programming platform or you need robots for a classroom you could have a lot of fun with this. The down looking IR sensors could either follow a line (like for a race) or to keep the robot on a piece of paper (draw a black line on the edge of the paper ad use a light colored pen). Other features include:

* 3 photoresistor light sensor
* 2 Infrared object sensors
* 2 Infrared line detection sensors
* 2 independent DC motors
* Stall sensor
* Speaker with full range of notes
* 3 LED indicator lights

The Scribbler Robot kit includes:

* Fully assembled Scribbler Robot
* Programming Cable (serial)
* The Scribbler Robot Start-up Guide
* Scribbler Software and Documentation CD-ROM

Parallax to intro Scribbler programmable robot

The Scribblerrobot home page

robotics, Parallax, robotics