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 | Carpet Moth
Jim Garvin 07 Jan 2002
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Project Outline The new build of this is now in my video lessons.
I wanted to build a robot that had more of a personality
so I built a Moth. This bot has two distinct characteristics.
First, and the most basic to mobile robots is the obstacle avoidance.
Second was it's personality, how it behaved in it's environment.
Making it a moth, it didn't just travel in a strait line till it
came across an obstacle, as it traversed it's environment, it constantly
checked the light around it and changed it's course to correspond with the
brightest direction.
I used:
Tonka Base
68HC11 MCU
Futaba Servo
IR Range Finder
L293 Motor Controller
10 Segment LED
7805 5 volt regulator
3 Photo Resisters 5k - 500k
and a handfull of wires and resisters
I had a lot of fun with this project.
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Latest Journal Entry| Ranger 08 Apr 2002 |  So far my bot was cool and I was having fun but I felt something was
missing. Sure moths would fly around like idiots and hit what ever they
was in front of them but I wanted more from my bot. To this ends, I added
and Infrared range finder. It gives me an analog output from .6 - 3.1 volts.
It changes depending on the distance it is away from and object. It will reach 3.1 volts
if an object is 10cm away or closer and .6 volts is an object is 80cm away or farther.
The voltage will go up proportionality to the distance of the object to the ranger.
I mounted this ranger to the top of a servo. I hooked the servo up to port A and the
ranger up to another pin on the port E ( A/D port) this way I could use the servo and
sweep the ranger back and forth in front of my bot. Now with a reading from the ranger
I could tell if the moth was going to hit some thing before the whiskers do. Now it could
turn to avoid the obstacles before it ever hit them. THIS ROCKED !!
I could now watch this stupid thing for hours. This project has been a lot of fun. |
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