1. Mechanical Designs of robots

2. Robot that delivers stuff to locations
We will compare robots A, B, C, D, E, F
Robot can be prototyped with Lego NXT
Then we can add components from Tetrix
It is often faster, cheaper and better to design the robot from wood, plastic and metal by yourself and only use gears and motors with encoders from Tetrix.
We use this approach in our theatre.
Needs:
Doll grabbing (lifting)
Linear motion
Base control
How to design mechanically robots that can grab some items and deliver to certain locations?

3. Robot A Deliver dolls to locations
Grabs an item
Releases the item
Can be used to deliver little robot actors to locations in robot theatre
Uses line following

4. Robot takes some object (a doll) in place X and delivers it to the location in place Y

8. Robot D
The same as before, robot delivers dolls to locations

14. Robot B

15. Robot B
Robot delivers dolls to locations, as before

18. Robot C- to play volleyball
Robot plays volleyball

21. Robot to play hockey

22. Robot to play hockey

23. Robot to play hockey

25. Robot to play hockey

26. Robot to play hockey

27. Philosophy How to Design a Robot

29. General Design Considerations
Effectiveness
Does the robot do what you want it to?
Speed & accuracy
Reliability
How often will it work?
Ease of Implementation
Balance complex, effective solutions with simple to build solutions
Faster implementation means that you have more time allowed for debugging,
and probably, it means less debugging

30. Effectiveness Mechanical Electrical Multiple stages
Efficient use of inputs/outputs
Low power usage
Effective Motor use
Sensor placement /use
Mechanical
– Bearing surfaces
– Stiffness
– Appropriate constraints on degrees of Freedom
– Gearing
– Speed
– Low mass / moment of inertia

31. Reliability Electrical Mechanical – Stiffness
Circuit modularity
Grounding
Shielding
Mechanical
– Stiffness
– Appropriate constraints on degrees
of freedom
– Simplicity

32. Ease of Implementation
Mechanical
Off-the-shelf parts
Simplicity
Design for loose tolerances
Electrical
Multiple stages
Board layout – related ccts on 1 board
Circuit modularity
Accessibility

33. Grabbing Items Using some intelligence

34. Tower of Hanoi Problem
Write the software for Tower of Hanoi Problem for a robot, with few pegs only.
Write the recursive software.

35. Robot Theatre

36. Projects from Lego Robots
A piano-playing robot
The piano-playing robot positions itself correctly in front of the piano (using a camera following a color target) and then plays with its two-fingered hand.

37. Projects from Lego Robots
Smiley face also has a small camera that tracks colors so it can follow the orange target.
The mouth and eyebrows move using servo motors.
Smiley face robot chases the moving orange target.
The eyebrows and mouth move to show happy and sad.

38. Robots for Autism Therapy
Teleoperated bear developed at MU
University of Hertfordshire UK
Robots are being developed for therapeutic treatment of children with autism. The therapist interacts with the child through the robot. Children with autism are especially drawn to robots even though they tend to shy away from other people. The teddy bear robot was developed by a capstone group of undergraduates. It moves its arms and legs, spins around, lights up LEDs, and plays sound, including the therapist’s voice. Control is handled by a laptop via wireless bluetooth.
Yale University
University of Sherbrooke

39. Sensors for TigerPlace to Help Older Adults Age Safely
These are pictures from TigerPlace. We install sensor networks in the apartments at TigerPlace to monitor people’s patterns of activity and especially detect when the patterns begin to change which may indicate a physical or cognitive problem that needs attention. The goal is not so much to prolong lives but rather to improve the quality of life by keeping people safe and as healthy as possible. If problems are detected, the nurses can treat these to prevent more serious problems. Although we are testing this out in TigerPlace, we hope to eventually make it available for private homes. (TigerPlace is an assistive living facility in Columbia, designed with input from many MU departments. It even has a vet clinic. Residents are encouraged to have pets.)

40. Basic Sensors
Motion sensors can detect general motion in a room or directed motion (like motion in the shower from a ceiling-mounted sensor). There is a stove temperature sensor. The bed sensor is a pneumatic tube positioned underneath the linens and measures displacement of the chest area while the resident sleeps. It returns qualitative pulse rate (low, normal, high), respiration (low, normal, high), and bed restlessness indicating poor sleep. Restlessness is helpful in early detection of infection, medication problems, and other ailments. (Believe it or not, every time your heart beats, your chest moves.)

41. Detection of Falls See also http://eldertech.missouri.edu
In addition to the motion and bed sensors, we are developing a camera network that can detect falls and eventually recognize gait patterns. To preserve privacy, we extract silhouettes of people and watch the shape of the silhouette.
See also

42. The robot theatre concept
hands
head PC
Personal computer
Bluetooth connection
GPU supercomputer
The robot theatre concept

43. This generic situation, where the robot’s behavior is conditioned upon the input from the feature detectors connected to the camera, maps to a constraint satisfaction problem as described here.
The way this would work is that the human / camera / robot system would generate optimization and satisfiability problems, to determine how the robot’s effectors should fire, and these problems can be remotely solved using Orion.
For example, you could acquire a Hansen Robotics Einstein, sit it him on your desk, train a camera on your face, use an anger feature detector that causes the Einstein robot to laugh harder the angrier you get.

45. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Programming and Customizing the PIC microcontroller by Myke Predko
PICmicro Mid-Range MCU Family Reference Manual by MICROCHIP
PIC Robotics, A beginner’s guide to robotics projects using the PICmicro by John Iovine

46. …BIBLIOGRAPHY Websites referred…
The Seattle Robotics Society Encoder library of robotics articles
Dallas Personal Robotics Group. Most of these tutorials and articles were referred.
Go Robotics.NET, this page has many useful links to robotics articles.

47. …BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carnegie Mellon Robotics Club. This is the links page with lots of useful resources
This page is called the “Micro-mouse Handbook” and an excellent tutorial for small scale robotics.
This is the main website of microchip. Thousands of application notes, tutorials & manuals can be found here.