Robotics » Roombotics

This last few weeks I have been mainly going robot crazy. First off, I finished Asimov’s second ‘Elijah Bailey’ robot book: The Naked Sun. It was great … as are all his books! Then I watched I-Robot and Iron-Man, and it got me thinking … I need a robot! … so after looking around a bit I found two broken iRobot ‘Roomba’ robotic vacuum cleaners on ebay, bid on them and got one for £25 and the other for £10.

Afer a bit of tinkering and parts swapping – I now have a perfectly working Roomba (the silver one) cleaning my floors – hurrah!! But the great thing about these robots is that they are totally hackable And this is what I plan to do with the second fella (the green one). He does everything bar vacuum – so it’s a perfect platform to build on and have some nerdy robotic fun and games Microsoft have released Microsoft Robotics Studio – which is a great free platform for visually programing robot logic – like controlling servo’s, motors, reading sensors etc. and they have support for Roomba too   which makes it a good place to start learning.

However, I also got hold of a set of classic Meccano! Remember that? So today I  have spent a perfectly sunny afternoon being 8 years old again building things with my new toy. The box came with a leaflet for building a crane, a car and a plane, which nice as they are, weren’t exactly the reason behind geting it …

… but this was:

hehehe …

… can you see what I did there?  hahaha … it’s an arm with 5 or 6 degrees of freedom (shoulder x2, elbow, wrist, hand … and grip).

To get this moving I’m gonna have to grab a bunch of servo’s and a programmable AVR microcontroller. It will take a bit more work interfacing with my Roomba … and I’ll probably have to ditch MSRS and just wire Roomba’s sensors and motors into the AVR as well … but I like a challenge and it’s going to be the dope when it’s all working.

Watch this space …