A brand new robot, designed
      to test out the concepts of using insect like antennas and small
      mammal whiskers to assist in internal home navigation. Only six
      inches in diameter, it is the perfect size for our robot arena
      test area and will be right for upstairs testing in the home
      environment. All programming is done using CCS-C.

Current Progress:
 
The TDR
      robot with frontal whisker sensor plate installed. Room for three
      sets of whiskers are provided, with two sets installed here.
      The robot can now navigate the arena by "feel" and
      using the whiskers as touch sensors, take evasive action. This
      is one small step toward increasingly sophisticated behavior
      that is planned.
 
Front view
      showing layout of the two sets of installed whiskers. The top
      set has not been put in yet, and will be the longest ones.
 

      
Schematic
      1
 Schematic diagram for whisker plate
 
Sensor plate diagram. When
      the wires touch either the brass plates on the ends or the buss
      bar loops under the frontal wires, the whisker is grounded. This
      sends a high to low signal to the main processor. Red LEDs indicate
      an impact as well.

  Finite State Diagram of initial TDR

 

      
Movie 1
Here
      are three You Tube movie clips of the robot in action in the
      arena. This first one is the robot bouncing around inside the
      2 x 4 foot test arena using its whiskers for navigation. The
      robot turns more when the frontal whiskers are touched than when
      the side whiskers are activated.
 

      
Movie 2
Direct
      frontal impact here, shows the response of a face on hit with
      the wall. To detect this, we first stop the robot when either
      right frontal or left frontal whisker is touched. then wait about
      1/10 of a second. Then look at the OTHER whisker to see if its
      also touched. this way a frontal hit with both can be detected.
      You have to wait and look because the processor is so fast that
      it will start reacting to one side micro seconds later, and ignore
      the second impact on the front which may occur milliseconds later.
 

      
Movie 3
A
      typical problem with simplistic programing like this is what
      is infamously known as "corner entrapment". This is
      where the robot gets stuck (forever) in a corner because it rocks
      back and forth on its whiskers to try to escape the two walls.
      There are many simple fixes for this, but until I put them in,
      I wanted you to see what it looks like.

Previous Uploads on this robot:

Intro page 1

 

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