Robotics Projects

Crabbie

Andrew Forsberg and I built this robot. Crabbie sought bright lights while navigating around obstacles. He had three bump sensors and two light sensors. Crabbie lived a short but happy life, after which he was reincarnated as...

Kubla

This six-legged walking robot is based on the paper "A Robot that Walks; Emergent Behaviors from a Carefully Evolved Network" by Rodney Brooks. Kubla walks with a ripple stride. Click on the above image to view a close-up of the leg joint.

This robot consists of two Motorola 6.270 robot controllers, 12 motors, 12 customized potentiometers (for sensing joint angles), a serial cable (for communication between the two controllers) and an assortment of Legos. Kubla's two lead-acid motor battery packs are too heavy for the flexible plastic Lego frame, and are therefore carried separately.

The master controller contains the walking behavior software, which is written in Rex. Subsumption architecture is used to arbitrate between behavior layers. The slave controller merely drives the six hip motors, and runs a simple communications client written in C.