Servo - May 2008

Geekings From France

build their own
projects (robotic
project, educational
project, etc.). As
robotics is computing
plus electronics plus
mechanics, and only
few users know all of
these fields, we
wanted to give tools to
allow the user to focus
on what he likes. Then,
the robot is designed
to be able to forget
one or two of these
fields. Of course, com-
puting basis are needed. This way, we
do our best to help users, giving lots
of downloadable examples and
providing personalized support.
Open architecture also means an
expandable and customizable robot.
Lots of robot makers want to reuse
some parts they already have (arm,
I²C stuff, etc.). With POB, they can.
This open approach is one of the keys
of our success in education, because
educators have a lot of possibilities to
focus on what they want.

POB ARM.

schools. With RISBEE, we target junior high schools and secondary schools. We had the surprise to see that highly skilled users also sometimes use RISBEE for quick sensor tests or quick idea validation. 2) Keeping the “open” philosophy, RISBEE is designed to work with different robots from the market. We are negotiating with well known robot makers to adapt RISBEE to their robots. The goal is to have only one development environment to know for several robots. But it is a bit early to tell more about it.

WB: Could you tell us more about the development of RISBEE and its goals?

PK: RISBEE follows the same philosophy: 1) To make the robot accessible for people who don’t know programming. Historically speaking, POB users were mainly from higher education and a little from secondary

Good Sharky, Colonel God!

POB Technology terms the hobbyist use of their products as “innovative leisure,” and we certainly agree with such a moniker. The POB robot is a great educational tool, but its accessibility

and expandability also make it a great way to spend a casual afternoon tinkering. We are more of the mechanical predilection, so we wanted to see how easy it would be to add on a mechanical addition to the POB robot. As we alluded to earlier, we had a few extra servos to mess with. Even though the POB bot was already equipped with a capable gripper in the front, we thought of adding another robotic arm to the back (or perhaps it was more of a scorpion tail, depending on how you look at it). After using the test function to see that all of our servos (modified for full rotation) were fully functional, we were ready to go. Our additional arm was assembled in a bit of slapdash fashion, and we’re sure that many folks could come up with something much more elegant than the zip ties we used to attach the arm