Then
and
NOW
The Many Ways to Control a Robot
by Tom Carroll
I had an interesting conversation with a friend about some of my recent columns, in
particular, we talked about ways to control robots other than visual sensors such as the
Kinect and verbal control via speech recognition. We discussed early robots that used crude
wireless or wired control, as well as more modern concepts such as NASA's one ton Curiosity
that is being controlled from Earth all the way to Mars — despite the 10 to 15 minute signal
delays. These rovers require a lot of autonomy because of these signal delays, but remote
control capability of some functions is also a must.
As designers and builders of our robotic creations, we still want some sort of control over
our machines, even if the basic control is through autonomous sensor interaction with the
outside world. Quite frankly, there are many ways that allow a human to control a robot
outside of programming an autonomous bot. I won't be discussing internal robot control
methods (such as a sensor controlling movements). I am going to concentrate on strictly
'hands-on' human control methods and steer away from total autonomy.
74 SERVO 10.2012
Robots have fascinated me since I was a kid and first read I Robot by
Isaac Asimov. In June 1956, the Boy
Scout magazine, Boys’ Life had an
article entitled Gismo and I, by
Sherwood Fuehrer. Gismo the Great —
shown in Figure 1 — was human
sized and was ‘so neat’ in my young
mind. Fuehrer had used parts that he
got from his dad, an engineer, and
other scrounged parts. He used an old
tool box as the control panel. It had
no autonomy other than what switch
its young inventor pushed or flipped.
(You can see his ‘control box’ sitting
on a stool.)
I collected a pile of parts to build
my own ‘Cosmo’ that was mostly
heavy plywood, furnace ducting, juke
box parts and motors, a heavy tape
recorder, and assorted light bulbs. I
tried to make it move on some toy
rubber tires and two juke box motors,
FIGURE 1. Original Gismo the Great
from 1956 Boys' Life.
but the heavy beast fell over once and
shook our whole house. (Tall robots
don’t stand for long when the builder
uses single speed motors for the drive
wheels.) After that, I just kept it
stationary with a recorded voice and
flashing lights. The controls for all the
lights, motors, relays, and tape
recorder were what interested me the
most. It was nowhere as cool as
Gismo in Boys Life, but it kept me
busy.
Years later in 1986, as a scout
master and robotics engineer at
Rockwell, I was asked by Boys’ Life to
design and write about a simple, but
more modern robot that scouts could
build on their own, and to keep the
total cost below $50. The editor at
Boys’ Life decided to name it
‘Gismo2BL’ as the “son of Gismo”
from the earlier article. I used a typical
plastic waste basket as the body,
