Servo - November 2015

well as serving as a link between the brain and ventral nerve cord (VNC).

• The final ganglion — the suboesophageal ganglion — monitors, regulates, and controls the sensory and motor activities of the mouth parts.

Bug brains are pretty impressive, eh? Even more so when you consider the flexibility and diversity in the number of different roles that insects play. Sure, some are pests, but even those bugs that annoy us are very resourceful and resilient in their deliberate actions to continually bug us.

Now, on to bot (bug) brains!

Microcontroller-based Robots

If you want to add some “control” (i.e., movement and brains) to your robot, you’ll most likely reach for a microcontroller. Self-contained with its own programmable memory, a microcontroller is a small discrete digital device that shares a lot of characteristics with a desktop PC.

Some robot builders, however, might argue that one of the biggest drawbacks with using a microcontroller on a robot is that you must write your own software program for driving your creation. This is not an insurmountable obstacle. Merely another piece of the puzzle for turning a pile of parts into a functioning robot.

Ironically, programming most microcontrollers requires a PC. Go figure, eh? Luckily, the big names in robot microcontrollers (e.g., Arduino, Stamp, PICAXE, RaspPi, etc.) have easy-to-use PC-based programming environments (i.e., Integrated Development Environment or IDE) that can be coded in Basic, C, or C++ computer languages. So, the entire robot microcontroller programming process sorta Develop program on PC -> Compile program -> Load program -> Test on robot -> Repeat process.

No matter how much you think you know about programming, you are bound to make a coding mistake. Some mistakes — also known as “bugs” (an ironic term when you consider the discussion earlier in this article) — are relatively easy to find and correct. Others can be downright inscrutable in their nature and seemingly impossible to eliminate.

If you don’t like being saddled with programming and its inherent debugging tasks, that’s okay. Either hire a programmer or find another brain for your robot. A brain that doesn’t require any programming — like my Microcerebrum that is outlined in Figure 3.

Introducing a Bug-Inspired Bot Brain

Just like Mark W. Tilden’s BEAM robots (i.e., Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, Mechanics), not all robots run on microcontrollers. Remember, Mark championed a non-programmed robot building movement that grew with a life of its own to become one of the elemental building blocks in every budding robot builder’s vocabulary.