Control Engineering

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Robotics Education
March 24, 2008

Well worn and substantially modified Robot Games participant
Photo: HiTec Robotics http://www.hitecrobotics.com  

EDUTAINMENT BOT
Hitec Robotics http://www.hitechrobotics.com  is holding the First Annual Hitec Robotics Cup competition April 25-27, 2008. There will be three different athletic events for the robots: 1. The 3 meter sprint. 2. The obstacle course of stairs, blocks and turns. and 3. The robot version of martial arts hand to hand combat. These Edutainment Robot competitors are one foot tall, controlled with 16 HSR-8498HB digital servos built by Hitec specifically for the ROBONOVA-I. The servos feature “set pin” locking of the servo arms for easy assembly, over-voltage current protection, super strong Karbonite gear trains and “feedback” technology for simple programming. Cost is about $900-$1,000 and are available through several on-line hobby stores (see the LINKS button at the top of their web page). Meant for hacking, experimenting, and tinkering these machines are not the typical consumer product. Shawn, the HiTec rep I spoke to on the phone, said that these robots are so adaptable that a person should be prepared to spend a lot of hours with their bot modifying it and writing new programs for it.   A search of the web for ROBONOVA turns up an amazing number of videos featuring this robot design. 

UNIVERSITY EDUTAINMENT
Doing a web search for where a person could get a degree in Robotics turns up the fact that the name of the field is shifting. Mechatronics is emerging as the multi-technological discipline that integrates mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer engineering and information sciences. This approach of integrating engineering disciplines horizontally as well as integrating them vertically from concept to production has created new efficiencies in manufacturing and so is likely to be around for a while. Originally intended to meet the needs of complex robotic systems, the mechatronics approach is being found to be useful in other endeavors such as industrial engineering, civil engineering and materials science. 

NEIGHBORHOOD EDUTAINMENT
I suppose that, to keep up with the language shift, the Robot Club of Traverse City, MI (RCTC) http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/robotcluboftraversecitymi/  should really be called the Mechatronics Club of Traverse City, MI.  I will have to think about that for a while and get used to the idea. Perhaps you would like to comment on what the field of Robotics should be called? 

WOOD AS AUTOMOBILE FUEL
The addition of modern automatic controls to the WWII wood gasification process will allow a small segment of the population to drive their vehicles on scrap wood. AIM Team member Gene Crocker is working on automating the controls for a customer. The customer says that he has driven his pick up 70,000 miles with a manually controlled gasifier and wants to automate it. He also wants to Gene to build six more sets of controls for a stationary power plants. The skid mounted power plants are for neighbors who want to make money by burning wood and selling the power to the grid.  I have lots of old magazines and wood scraps that could be fed to a gasifier. National Energy Independence is not going to be achieved by the adoption of a single replacement for foreign oil. Instead, it is most likely going to be a lot of people doing a lot of different things to create a National Energy Independence Quilt.  It will be people doing what suites them best or makes the most sense for them based on the resources available to them. Many of the things people come up with are going to need automation and automatic controls add to them. This could create a cottage industry of designing and building automatic controls for small markets.  Up until now the assumption was that the street legal automatic guided vehicle of the near future would be fueled by gasoline or maybe diesel.  With the scarcity of oil and the direction the prices of it are headed, all vehicles of the near future will need to be powered by alternatives to foreign oil.  

2007 DARPA Urban Challenge

Photo by AIM Team members Linda and Tom Graham

GO ROBOTS !

Paul F. Grayson - Chief Engineer
AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL MAGIC, LLC
Racing to build technology that saves soldier's lives.
390 4-Mile Rd. S.
Traverse City, MI 49686-8411
(231) 946-0187, (231) 883-4463 Cell
pgrayson@aimagic.org  
http://aimagic.org  
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/robotcluboftraversecitymi/  
http://www.controleng.com/blog/1180000318.html  

Posted by Paul Grayson on March 24, 2008 | Comments (0)