The Robots are Coming

Jeff has gotten infatuated with robotics.  It started with a small hobby computer board called Arduino which we used to make Lillian’s traffic light science project last year.

 

Then we created a companion for Roomba that would navigate itself around the room.

 

Then another simplier version.

Next was a small kit for robotic sumo fighting.  This little guy we programmed to follow courses on the floor we laid out with black electrical tape.

Somewhere along the line, the idea came up to make recreate Johnny#5 from the movie Short Circuit to go trick-or-treating on Halloween.  This moved us into the next phase was to build an open source project called Poppy: Ergo Jr, which bears a resemblance to the lamp in the opening sequence of Pixar movies.

It’s next older brother,or sister, was a humanoid we call Bumble.  Like Jr, we printed most of the parts on a 3D printer, although the motors of course were bought online.  Unlike previous project they aren’t running on Intel chips (yet).  Bumble isn’t quite working quite right as of the time of this writing.  There are some tweaks to his posture which is too far forward causing him to fall down and his gyro and distance sensor isn’t hooked up.

Fortunately Santa, read May, brought another robot kit into the family: Darwin.  Since this was a pre-packaged kit, things eventually functioned properly and will provide learning for getting his predecessor more stable.  In addition to building a homemade Darwin, in all black so we can stage Star Wars battles, there is a robotic arm partially built to better understand motion control.  Oh how cool is it to be a high-school student these days with all this tech so accessible.

 

Anyway, the robots are taking over the house.  So much so we have created it’s own website: www.primorobots.com.   Come visit us for a Robot Sumo contest we are putting together!