Dandroid 2002: Junkbot

The robot now had enough sensors and some blinking lights from a toy I found being thrown away to give it some personality. To avoid motor increasing sensor interference, there was now two power supplies, one for drive motors, the others for CPU and sensors.

Dandroid 2002: The Water Tower

This new ARobot base design allowed for more sensors. The plastic bottle to raise a digital compass away from the motor magnets below.

Dandroid 2002: Cookie Box Exoskeleton

Living in a tiny flat and without any tools, I'd look for suitable materials to make a robot body. It was a bonus if you had to eat two boxes of cookies as part of the job! There is sonar system mounted above the ARobot board here. While I thought it looked great, mounting more sensors going to be difficult with the internal wiring and no means to build an internal support structure.

The ARobot Chassis

I somehow stumbled upon (or perhaps I searched for days on-line) a robot chassis to build upon. The idea of Lego was always around, but despite how great Lego bricks are there is one serious problem: your robot looks like Lego! For this reason, I try to avoid wood and stick with metal and plastic for robot parts. The ARobot kit included a programmable BASIC Stamp chip, a metal platform and a geared motor plus a simple, but clever whisker system to detect when this metal plate was about to smash into a wall.

1980s - planting the seed

I've always had an interest in robots - specifically those that seemed to have personality. I'm not unique in that way, after all, who didn't like R2D2? My father gave me some construction and electronics kits for birthday presents which we put together in the basement and it must have planted a seed. Since the robots I wanted to meet do not exist (yet), perhaps I could make one. Rather than being too ambitious for a humanoid, the idea of a robot pet might be feasible.