Relay Rover from INEX

Also in Bangkok, I managed to find the INEX office in Bangkapee with excruciating difficulty though it was kind of near the Salesian Provincial House. INEX is a Singaporean company with distributors in various countries.  When I asked INEX Bangkok if I could buy a robot from them, they showed me all they had. But when I asked if I could order from the Philippines, they informed me that Genetics Computer Institute distributes INEX from there.

Being quite expensive but well built and quality focused, I chose the least expensive one. It's a relay rover. This one is not autonomous as you can see from the wire in the picture. However this is a good exercise robot for Elementary kids to practice and hone their skills. They can even build it themselves. It also comes with a gripper. This makes it function in a way all those other autonomous ones could but with no freedom from its master (the one who controls the switch).

Future Kit Trio Robots

Last month I got the chance to go to Bangkok to attend a salesianity seminar. Having one day before my flight, I decided to look for this company where they sell inexpensive simple programmable robots.

So there's this trio for like $25-$35 each (more expensive at e-bay). The blue one with two sensors is a line tracer, you have to bend the sensors downwards towards the floor for it to detect your black line and follow it. The middle one is a sumo robot and will stay in a circle of black and try to push away all its foes unless it gets pushed out first.  And the red one is an obstacle avoidance robot which goes around and will try not to hit anything or anyone in its way. I forgot to include in the picture the light follower.
They have the six pin ISP socket for advanced programming of their Atmel ATmega168.

They can be found in the Future Kit website.
 http://www.futurekit.com/2009/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1263&Itemid=350

Adventure Bot and the I-Racer (blue-tooth controlled)

Since they needed samples for autonomous robots here at Don Bosco Mandaluyong robotics lab, I got for them two from Dagurobots.com

This first one is called an Adventure Bot. Well it's like a puppy on wheels. If you place your hand near its head, it follows the hand. If your hand is too near its head, it goes backwards so as not to hit it. And this comes with background sounds too. The four sets of sensors below (around its mainboard) could be programmed either for obstacle avoidance or for edge detection. Yup the latter programming makes this baby detects the edges of the table so she doesn't fall off.

This other one is the i-Racer. It's basically a toy car like those RC ones. But instead of a Remote Controller, you use an Android apps from your smartphone to play around with it.

Football with a Mini BiPed robot

This one is called an autonomous mini biped and it senses when an object comes nears it and kicks.

Assembled this one last year and got the parts from dagurobots.com
You can get more information from Let's Make Robots
http://letsmakerobots.com/node/22588
 If you remove its face plate, you can find the Atmega328 processor which can be reprogrammed using an ISP programmer (notice the six pins on the upper left corner of its head).

What's keeping me busy these days? Robotics (my 3pi friend)

After being busy with a thousand and one things, this sem break I could finally have time to dabble with a hobby I've started self-studying last year - robotics. So finally, I unpacked my first sleeping robot which I acquired (via e-bay)and tinkered with last year. Welcome my Pololu 3pi friend!

The Pololu 3pi robot is a  mobile platform which features two micro metal gearmotors, five reflectance sensors, an 8×2 character LCD, a buzzer, and three user pushbuttons, all connected to a C-programmable ATmega328 microcontroller. It is capable of speeds of around 3 feet per second, 3pi is a great first robot for programming beginners and a  second robot for those looking to move up from non-programmable or beginners first robot.

This could be programmed as a line follower robot and as a maze solving robot. You could program it for other tasks but these two were the only ones I managed so far. Although it's Arduino, I had to use then the ISP AVR programmer and the AVR program and interface to re-program sketches instead of the easier Arduino 1.0.1. For more info go to: http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/975

The Runaway Bunny (Filipino version)

The Runaway Bunny is a 1942 picture book written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd. The plot deals with a small rabbit, who wants to run away. His mother, however, tells him that "if you run away, I will run after you". What we have here is a translation in Filipino- "Ang Munting Kunehong Nais Maglayas." I have to thank Michael Albert Idioma and his family for casting and engineering the sounds in this project.