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Micro Robots.

Very small robots with features equivalent to their larger counterparts. For classrooms, robotics labs and more!

joshua-elsdonJoshua Elsdon
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Robotics is fun, and more robots is always better. Unfortunately you will quickly find yourself running out of money, space and patience.

Our solution is to design and produce robots that are small enough that storage and arena sizes will never be a problem and priced such that swarms of robots are accessible on a sensible budget. The robots have a footprint smaller than 20mm x 20mm, weigh 5 grams and can cost ~ 10gbp (18usd) in quantity. This specification will be met whilst maintaining all the features that a roboticist will expect: odometry, collision sensors, line sensors, up-link and down-link communications.

This project is a continuation of another we have presented, though since the inception of that project we have made significant progress towards a viable solution. The series of logs on this project will focus on software and commercialisation of the design. Further the aim of the project is now not focused on education, and more focused on research users.


Robot features:

  • Powerful STM32F0 core @48Mhz.
  • Stepper motor drive for open loop odometry.
  • Dual forwards facing proximity sensors.
  • Single downwards facing line/arena sensor.
  • IR receiver, using standard 38khz modulation. (NEC protocol or faster UART based system)
  • IR transmitter.
  • On board battery charger and on-the-fly charging contacts for continuous experiments.
  • RGB led for general use (blinky blinky).

Sources:

PCB source. Shared under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) .

Software source. Shared under GNU General Public License V3.0 .

V4.0+ software source (Currently private while clarifying procedure of installation etc) Shared under GNU General Public License V3.0 .

  • Introduction to the new Micro Robots project.

    Joshua Elsdon • 03/21/2017 at 17:49 • 0 comments

    This project is a continuation of a project that we started working on in 2015. It has been organically growing since then in the time between our real work. Whilst it is hard to mark a particular moment the project changed we feel that it has moved from a PCB design project to an application design project. In other words the hardware is reaching a point of maturity and now is no longer a prime focus (though incremental upgrades are still on the schedule). So now we are focusing on realising an application with the robots.

    So if you are interested in the history of the project we have quite a well documented project here that chronicles the development of the circuit board, the wheel manufacture and many more insights. This project will be focusing on V5.0 and beyond of the hardware and will document our attempts at scaling to larger runs of manufacture, implementing some fun experiments (and if you are very lucky maybe some elements of commercialisation).

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