Newsgroups: comp.robotics
Path: brunix!news.Brown.EDU!noc.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!linac!uchinews!raistlin!timbuk.cray.com!hemlock.cray.com!kilian
From: kilian@cray.com (Alan Kilian)
Subject: Maybe I haven't ever built a robot. (Robotics VS Toy building)
Message-ID: <1993Aug13.090141.6086@hemlock.cray.com>
Lines: 37
Nntp-Posting-Host: gopher
Organization: Cray Research, Inc.
Date: 13 Aug 93 09:01:41 CDT


My latest "robot" is a flower pot with a Polaroid ultrasonic range module
mounted on a stepper motor and a large hideous flower mounted on a model
airplane servo motor.

The whole thing is controlled by a MC68HC11 based single-board computer
(Miniboard)

The stepper motor turns the ultrasonic transducer to eight different
directions and records the range for each direction. The controller
then chooses the nearest object, ignoring the background walls which were
recorded when the flower pot powered up and chooses a direction for the
servo motor so that the head of the flower follows people walking around
in the hallway.

Now I could have called it a "Real-time data aquisition and tracking unit"
and probably gotten a PHD from the control system design, but I called it
"Art" and got a lot of artists mad. (Well it has no meaning since it isn't
"against" anything. No statement, no art)

The whole thing was a big pain in the ass to design, build and get running.
Really running, not just concepts that sound like they will work.

Does it have a purpose? Nope
Did I personally learn a lot from building it? Yup.
Did the robotics community benifit from it? Yup. Plenty of software for
  driving stepper motors, servo motors and range modules has been posted
  here and to robot-board-request@oberon.com.

Now I think that that is a robot.

                       -Alan Kilian


-- 
 -Alan Kilian           kilian@cray.com 612.683.5499 (Work) 612.721.3990 (Home)
"The cartesian coordinate system is racist, sexist and opressive" -Joan@Siggraph
