Prisker
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This is a little robot I built, my daughter called him (it) Prisker. It's about the size
(when viewed from above) of a compact disc.
It's based around a Cricket (or Handy Cricket)
which is a small microcontroller/robotics board developed at M.I.T. I believe Fred Martin is more
or less responsible for the PIC-based Cricket. You program the Cricket in Logo and can control a
couple of motors, read a couple of sensors, and send data to other Crickets via infra red. (There is
also an expansion bus that has, currently, few peripherals.)
In an attempt to make it more or less as compact as I could, I used modified R/C servos for the
motors (modified that is so that they rotate continuously).
I decided to leave the rear bumper
"sensorless" (in the photo, the bumper we see), but for the front bumper I installed two switches - one left and one right. By tying
these switches together with resitors in a sort of resistor ladder, I can determine which of either
(or both) switches were closed. In this way, I only tie up one of the two sensor inputs.
That left a sensor free. Although not seen in this photo, I added a simple photocell for the last
sensor.
I'm working on a dark-seeking behavior for little Prisker based upon a statistical model
methodology for finding the dark places in an environment. More on that later (if it is
successful). |