Servo - October 2014

80 SERVO 10.2014

vacuum cleaners or bought new ones only to remove the LIDAR unit for a different use.

I have yet to disassemble my Neato as it is a pretty good vacuum cleaner. Many people on the Internet have reported great success of using the rotating sensor for room SLAM mapping on their bots.

The Kinect that I mentioned earlier was a popular hack for robots. The Parallax Eddie and Willow Garage’s TurtleBot robots were among the first commercially available units to use the unique camera (originally developed as part of the X-box game system).

The Eddie shown in Figure 12 uses a Propeller eight-core (cog)

microcontroller for control of the platform. You simply add a Kinect and your own laptop computer set up to run Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 (RDS 4) to process the Kinect camera’s images. As you can see from the photo, there are two Ping))) sensors and three IR sensors used for collision avoidance, interconnected with the Eddie board in the lower center of the very robust robot platform. Parallax discontinued the Eddie and has introduced several versions of its new robust Arlo platform that uses the same mechanical structure and drive systems.

The TurtleBot shown in Figure 13 was developed by Willow Garage as an intelligent demonstration platform for their ROS (Robot Operating System). Using a Kinect sensor, it was based on an iRobot Create and also came with a powerful ASUS 1215N netbook for image processing. The newer TurtleBot uses a Yujin Robot Kobuki instead of the Create, but experimenters still seem to prefer the Create platform.

Microcontrollers Become More Power ful

Some of the earliest home-built robots used the 6502, Z80, and similar microprocessors that were the heart of the early PCs. The next step brought forth the microcontroller — a processing unit that was more adept at communicating with sensors and motors than using a high level language to ‘talk’ to humans. Some of the more popular microcontrollers used in personal robots are the Microchip PIC, the Parallax Propeller, the Motorola/Freescale 68HC11, the Atmel AVR, and the ARM Cortex. Microcontroller boards have become very popular for robotics experimenters — especially the Arduino series with close to a million boards in use. Designed and built in Italy, the open source Arduino Uno board shown in Figure 14 is based on the series of Atmel AVR or ARM microcontrollers, with C or C++ being the favored software. Though the board has several different output/input locations, the use of a plug-in ‘shield’ allows builders to access different types of sensors or motor control functions. The Raspberry Pi (made in the UK) is another very popular ‘single-board computer’ that is also based on the ARM 1176JZF-S microcontroller running at 700 MHz. Shown in Figure 15, the computer can run numerous operating systems, with Linux variations and Python being some of the most popular. It has up to Figure 13. Original Willow Garage TurtleBot.