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Home -> Robots
Current Projects:
 | Balancing Robot Project - This project is
where most of my time is going these days. I have teamed up with my
good friend Bob, another member of the San Jose Home Brew robot club, to build a
rather large, balancing robot. This robot uses a self-designed PIC
Microcontroller brain for balancing, and reading sensors, etc. |
| Robo-Magellan Robot - Yet another team Bob &
Ted robot project. This one has literally been an Odyssey. We
are working on an entry for this contest at the SRS Robothon for 2004.
This is an outdoor navigation competition. We have been working on our
entry on and off for about a year now, and I finally have a web page up with
more details on this exciting robot. |
| Tabletop Challenge Robot - The San Jose Home
Brew Robotics Club is having a tabletop robot challenge. People in the
club are challenged to build a robot that can drive around a 4x8 table
without falling off, and locate a 2x2 inch puck, and push it into a shoebox
at the end of the table. The eventual goal is for 1 on 1 tabletop
soccer. I built 3 different robots for this challenge, and so click on
the link and check them all out. |
| Trinity Fire-fighting Robot - Every April,
Trinity
College holds a contest to see who can build the best firefighting
robot. Fire-fighting robots, are table top sized robots, that can
drive into a model sized house, and locate a burning candle and extinguish
it. The robot is totally autonomous, and cannot be touched once it
starts into the house. I am working on an entry for this coming April,
2005. It made its debut at the Seattle
Robothon
firefighting competition in October, 2003, and took 2nd place! |
Building Robots:
| BotStack - Bob Allen and I have been working on a reusable, modular
robot architecture that we can use to make new and exciting robots without
reinventing the wheel for every new robot project. What has evolved
over the last 2 years has been a bus-based board stack that we are now using
in all of our robots. |
| My Electronics Lab - Although I am an avid software guy, I have spent
many hours designing and building robot electronics. Here is an
overview of the process, and tools I use for building the electronics-side of robots. |
| Robot CAD Symbols - I am working with other members of the Home Brew Robotics Club to create a
re-usable library of robot CAD symbols. It is a tedious process of picking
up common robot parts, measuring them using calipers, and modeling them using
CAD software. |
Robot Interests:
| Autonomous Intelligent Mobile Explorer robot - I am currently
planning to build an autonomous rover, that I can use
for testing computer vision, AI, and navigation strategies. Now if I
just had that home machine shop I always dreamed of...this would certainly
come together quicker. I have been slowly been putting this together
over months now. Click on the link to see pictures of the various
parts I have acquired, and an updated on the building progress. |
| Autonomous Teamwork Bots - I am working on a
small team of robots that can scoot around on the floor, and communicate
with each other, ad-hoc. Eventually I would Iike to use them for team
oriented tasks like robot soccer, or for experimenting with robotic social
behavior. |
| Lego Mindstorms bots - I have been building
some little Lego bots. I have started doing some hardware hacking to
make the bots able to do more than just 3 channels of input, and 3 channels
of output. Click on the link to see photos of some of my Lego bots. |
Local Clubs and Events:
| San Jose Home Brew Robotics Club -
Meets the last Wednesday of every month. This is the club I am a
member of, and where you can usually find me at the regular meeting.
They have a SIG meeting that is usually held the week before.
Sometimes I show up for that too...just depends on how busy things get. |
| San Francisco Robotics Society of America
- Meets the first Saturday of every month. I have only gone to a
couple of
their meetings. They meet up at SF state, and parking is always a
problem. However, they are a good group, and always fired up to see
new faces at their meetings. |
| Seattle Robotic
Society - Yes, I know this isn't exactly local, however, they have an
excellent club up there in Seattle. I have attended their annual
Robothon the last two years in a row, and it was well worth the trip of to
Seattle for a weekend of non-stop robotics. Their new
Robo-Magellan competition, definitely will keep me
coming back year after year to see how it evolves. Dave Hylands from
the Seattle club did not have anywhere to host his webpage of pictures and
videos from the 2004 Robothon, so they are up on my website now for others
to view and download. |
Events:
| Robolympics - 2004 was the
first year they held this comprehensive robotics event. Pretty much,
every single type of robotics competition event, is held at this 3-day
festival. You can be sure to find me there all three days. |
| RoboGames 2005 - Here are photos
and video I took at the Robomagellan component of this event. |
My Robot Past:
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I have been interested in robotics ever since I was a teenager, and
learned how to program my first computer. One of my earliest
robots was a Heathkit Hero-1. I have fond memories of spending
many hours, hand coding 6809 op-codes into the Hero keypad. During
college, I sold the Hero to another robot enthusiast, and I regretted
getting rid of it within a month of the sale. Looking back, it was
quite a piece of nostalgia, and amazingly advanced for its time.
I concentrated on AI and neural networks in college, and have been
working on more and more advanced bot projects where I can put that
knowledge to good use.
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