Cbot1A - Plant Maintenance Robot Rebuild Preliminary Development Projects Updated 12/26/15 Key Search Words: ROBOT, ROBOTICS, ROBOTIC VISION, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AI

CBOT-1a: Plant Watering Robot

In a 3 month long project, the highly successful CBOT1 was finished growing a planter full of seeds to huge pea plants, and after harvest time was done, the next project was to rebuild this robot so that it would be able to do more planters in its daily mission. The main frame, water tanks and most of the mechanical mechanisms were retained, however all the electronics was stripped out and the robot was completely reprogrammed for its new sensors and sound synthesizer. In the photo above, you can see without the robots water spash dome in place the additional circuits that were added to the top level. Here is a break down as to what we have right now, just before we move the robot upstairs and program in the planter locations for its new job:

 
Poor Robot! I first started by completely ripping the robot to pieces, then removing all the non requred hardware...

 
I made brand new wheels from scratch. I cut round disks from Masonite using a circle cutter on a drill press, then polyurethened them. Next, the rim was made from rubber screen door molding wrapped like a big grooved rubber band around the rim. Finally, an hub set was made from some old gears. Two, three and four inch sizes shown here. I use the 3 inch.

 
Final wheels, both sides!

 
And now installed on the robot to replace the awful plastic ones had that had no traction. They work fantastic so far...

 
All new processor, a PIC16F887 that is more powerful and state of the art.

 
The sound processor I designed to work with a serial input from the main processor. Creating robot sounds takes A LOT of room up on a robots program. This completely removes it to a small side processor on a separate board. I simply send a single byte command and up to 256 different sounds can be created. I ve only done 16 sounds so far...

 
The compass board and (not shown) the new sonar sensor board are also taking a huge load of the main processor. In fact, I now have half the program space left over and can now fill in the driving directions to many planters now! The compass especially puts a huge load on the main chip, and is done here with a brand new state of the art 8 pin chip that I am using for the first time here, the 12F1840.

 

On the lower deck there have been lots of changes too. Here a new sound system allows you to actually hear the robots sounds now. (They were very faint before because of a very tiny speaker)

Also a battery shelf puts the center of gravity of the robot more towards the back and keeps it from almost tipping over forward when it stops.

 
The water tank sensors in the robots bottom section became totally corroded in only 3 months. Seen here they are green with corroded plates and wires. This was all torn out and replaced with....

 
Totally stainless steel wires and screws above the water line. No more corrosion and they sense the water levels just fine.

 

The splash dome in place, the final appearance of the new CBOT-1A.

The next step is we are moving the robot upstairs and progrmming it to water three planters. Stay tuned!

Interested in learning more on the development of this robot? Here are previous uploads - LATEST AT THE BOTTOM:

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