Attack of the bioloids!

Last year we started experimenting with he Bioloids Kit. Its a very powerful set of motors and a small computer that enables us to do some pretty neat things in ES451Mobile Robotics.

We had a good time with the 2nd annual "Worm Chariot Races"


Simple walking behavior are possible.


You can program the to react to their surroundings too.


Let's not forget about the Dancin Queens


And the dirtiest dancer of them all?


Seriously?

Tic Tac Toe

Tic Tac Toe is a pretty simple game to learn compared to chess or even checkers. But programming a robot to play is a lot more difficult than you might think. For starters there are 9! possible board configurations. Then there is the problem of sensing the board and moving the pieces. A group of students tackled this in Intro to Robotics:

A REALLY tiny project

1/C Eric Eastman (ESE) and 1/C Bryan Watson (ESE) attended the RoboCup US Open 2008 at Carnegie Mellon University on May 24-25 to participate in the Nanogram League demonstration. The Nanogram League is one of the newer leagues constraining the robotic devices to fit within a 300micrometer × 300micrometer footprint. The action takes place under the lens of a microscope with a 2.5 mm playing field and 50micrometer diameter balls. USNA also participated in the first Nanogram League Competition in 2007 in Atlanta, GA. The team plans to compete in 2009 in Vienna, Austria.

A Firm Grip

This year, for the first time we did open ended final projects in ES450 Intro to Robotics. There were lots of really creative entries, but this was one of the most original. The robot handshake:

Mids Warren and Smith

The robot uses a camera system to identify skin tones in the image. It computes the center and orientation of that group of pixels in space to try to estimate where it should move to meet your hand. The only problem? The grip is just a little too firm.