Author Archives: Alan

About Alan

I've spent some time working in the games industry, and now I'm currently coming to the end of a PhD in Robotics at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Dawn Robotics is an attempt at supporting myself doing something I love, and also a platform that I can hopefully use to turn my various ideas for robots, and robotic parts, into useful products.

Up and Running

Ok, so the store is now up, along with our forums and this blog and tutorial website. Dawn Robotics is open for business!

You’ll probably notice that things are a bit sparse round here at the moment, but over the coming weeks, months, and hopefully years, we aim to expand things a lot. We’ll be bringing in new products for the store, providing tutorials and news for the robotics community, and generally making this a much more useful site for people interested in learning about, and building robots.

So, watch this space! :)

Adding ‘Bump Navigation’ to a Robot

A small robotRobots need sensors in order to learn about their environment, and typically for mobile robots, this involves adding switches or contact sensors to the outside of the robot in order to work out when it’s hit something. Now this tutorial shows how by using an accelerometer, you can get rid of those sensors!

The Dagu Micro Magician V2 is a very versatile control board. One of its many features is an onboard MMA7361L accelerometer, and this means that it’s possible to use it to build a robot that can respond to obstacles without having to use traditional bump sensors such as microswitches. The basic idea is that a bump can be detected by looking at changes in the accelerations experienced by the robot.

 

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