Artificial Intelligence Depot
Visiting guest. Why not sign in?
News, knowledge and discussion for the AI enthusiast.
FEATURES COMMUNITY KNOWLEDGE SEARCH  
Get Creative: AI Article Writing Contest
Fancy the chance of getting developer focus, improving your research skills, sharing your artificial intelligence ideas, obtaining expert feedback, getting published online AND winning a prize?
Enter the AI Article Writing Contest!

Reply to Message

Not registered yet?

The AI Depot has a focused community of friendly users. Rather than let anyone abuse the site at the brink of promiscuity, we prefer to let only those with an active interest participate... this simply requires registering.

Why not sign up!

Joining the site's community is completely free. You can then post messages freely, and customise your personal profile at will. Specific privileges will also be granted to you, like being able to access printer-friendly articles without restrictions. So, why not register?

Username:
Password:
Subject:
Email me when someone replies.
Body:

Parent Message

Khepera and Lego

In the Mobile Robots group here, quite a few people are doing work with Kheperas. They're very small things, but they have way enough capabilities to keep you occupied for ages!

http://www.k-team.com/robots/khepera/khepera.html

The base is quite expensive for a hobbyist, and so are the various tools you use on top of that. You can get arms, and cameras and other cool sensor devices. The great thing is they plug into the back of your computer, so you can download programs to them directly.

Also, despite being a toy I think Lego is a very good option too. You can combine the actual lego with specialised circuits and motors, so you've got a very flexible base to build on. There's a course on robotics running every term here, and they have 'rugby' competitions with the lego robots... it's damn impressive what they can do with them. I think I might just have to join in next term! I'll try to find out how our robots in the labs are equipt, and let you know.

Keep in mind that keeping the control software on the PC will limit the mobility of your robot, with the wires and all. Embeded solutions are good for that reason.

935 posts.
Saturday 08 December, 09:42
Reply
Khepera

The Kheperea robots are quite good, and have been used for years by academic research departments and also for robot football competitions. They are pretty expensive though, and their very small size limits the types of addons that you can put on them (you would never be able to put stereo USB cameras onto one!).

There is also always a dilemma between deciding whether to have all the electronics onboard the robot or have it permanently tethered to a PC of some sort. Years ago when I first started to experiment with robots I wanted them to be completely self-contained units, but this approach can be expensive to construct and maintain. There are many types of embedded PC that you can buy now (you could even use old PDAs) but its all propietory technology and is usually expensive to replace if the robot bumps into something (as they often do). I found that once hard disks had failed of processors blown the parts were difficult to attain at reasonable cost.

For the Rodney robot I've gone for a device which is completely desk-bound and tethered to a desktop PC. Although this is limiting to some degree it does give the flexibility that when faster processors or better cameras become available it's all standard off-the-shelf PC technology and can be replaced easily at minimal cost. The ideal solution is probably to prototype the robot as a tethered device initially, then when the project is near completion put everything onto a small embedded PC board.

- Bob

136 posts.
Saturday 08 December, 10:05
Reply
Lego etc.

I absolutely agree LEGO is a good and flexible basis to build robots on. I was talking specifically about Lego Mindstorms though. Although very interesting, the system as I understand it is rather limited in its control capabilities.

As far as thethering is concerned, it would be ideal if there is a solution that allows robot control using a standard Ethernet connection. It's flexible to program and, more interestingly, you can untether the robot easily by using a BlueTooth or 805.11 network card.

Still, although this might change in the future, I am really less interested in making fully mobile robots. A (almost) stationary robot is fine, as long as I can use the power/resources and flexibility of a full PC to experiment on it.

Jeroen

28 posts.
Sunday 09 December, 01:13
Reply

Back to the Artificial Intelligence Depot.