The Robot Group will be participating in this year’s SXSW Create event at the Long Center, March 13th through the 15th. We will have several displays out including Nomad, Sand Draw, and several smaller robots doing what robots do. Come on out and see us.
The spider robot at the moment is simply a platform. I don’t have a purpose for it yet. I saw the designs on Instructibles.com and had to make one. The original platform was called Terra Spider. Its original purpose is to perform sampling of contaminated areas that may be too hazardous for humans to work. The concept is a group of these Terra Spiders would be delivered to an area via drone, or quadcopter. Once there they would work cooperatively to cover the area and sample the environment. I don’t have a use or interest in sampling but the platform intrigued me, so I modified it for my own use.
DumpsterBot (AKA DumbsterBot ) was the result of a plan to make a simple first pass low cost robot. By keeping my expectations low and using easy to fabricate materials (cardboard and hot-glue) I was able to give myself a greater likelihood of success. Plus I find running and gunning design can be rather fun for early development. The primary goal of this robot is to be a table survival robot, a robot that can explore the surface of a clean table without falling off. It is powered by two servo motors, reads the table edge with two micro rocker switches and is controlled by an arduino uno hooked up to a rechargeable battery. The body was built around the parts using scrap cardboard and a hot glue gun. With DumpsterBot complete I now have a platform for future club challenge competitions.
The Nomad is an outdoor roving robot built on the robot chassis kit from Servo City of the same name. It was initially built as an extension of the review I wrote of the chassis for Servo Magazine (which was published in the March 2015 issue). Check out that article for my experience building the chassis and my initial impressions. Here I will discuss more about the technology on board and plans for Nomad.
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