Robot Building for Beginners, Second Edition by David Cook

Robot Building for Beginners, Second Edition by David Cook

Review: I read this book on Books24x7.com on, which is a great service. You can read tons of books online for a membership fee. Books are of a business, IT, programming and technical nature. They have a good selection of robotics books too.

This book is not bad for a beginner who wants to build a nice line following robot on their own and really learn about the parts and tools involved in the process. This books does a nice job of covering the subject of making a very basic robot and introduces someone to robot building through the line following robot. This book does not cover any other types of robots and does not cover more advanaced typics like microcontrollers or computer control. If you desire to build something more than a line following robot I would not recommend this book.

Awesome video on Subsumption based robots

From Robots.net I came across this 2 hour video from David Anderson, a member of the Dallas Personal Robotics Group, with a great discussion and demonstration on some of the uses for subsumption.

You can view the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CXReb7f0Eo&feature=player_embedded#!

What I like is how far David has expertly taken the subsumption design approach to create what I would call high performing robots with a somewhat basic design.

In other words, his robots are not covered in duct tape with wires hanging out all over like mine, hehe

Pretty neat to see and educational. =)
Happy Roboting,
-Justin Ratliff

Cookie Monster

It only took forever, but I was finally able to update the cookie monster project at RobotBox.net. For some reason the site decided to frown upon my text entries and photo uploads.

This little robot I plan to use to desktop experiments and as a portable robot for education use and show and tell events. He was cheap to make. Quick to make. Easy to carry places and cute!! :-)

Servo POWER!

Powering more then 2-3 servos on a robot can became a rather large pain in the side. I've never addressed the concern for powering several servos at once before with out either burning out a voltage regulator or just using batteries in the proper range for the servos.

With my new robot David, a small humanoid, about the size of a toddler, I needed to power 6 servos from a 12 source. David's power is going to be a 12volt SLA rechargeable battery, but for now is is powered by a plug in Ac-DC source. Originally I designed a power system with a 12 volt regulator (7812) to provide power to a (7805) 5 volt regulator for logic circuits and a (7806) 6 volt regulator for the servo power. I soon found my design was flawed in several ways as all of my regulators were getting hot and in certain circumstance they would go into thermal shutdown and stop working.

I really wanted to create a power system that was simple, cheap and would provide all of David's power needs from a single power source. His power needs include Basic Stamp IIe, a mini Serial Servo Controller II board, (6) standard servos, a laser tag gun, several sensors for motion and object detection, (2) 12V dc drive motors and PWM control boards for the DC motors. When Davids motors are running, the amperage demands can really add up.

Through discussions on the TRCY.org Yahoo Messageboards, several members contributed ideas to my issues which lead me to discover a few things.

1.) I needed to get rid of the 7812 12volt regulator, as it was rated for 1 amp, it was doing none of the other systems any good.

2.) I was mistakenly powering the mini Serial Servo Controller II board from the 7805 5volt source. The documentation states the logic power needs to be 7-15 volts as the board has it's own regulator.

3.) I had no heatsink or supporting filtering caps on the 7805, I added a heatsink and a 10uf cap on the input side of the 7805 regulator.

4.) The 7806 was doing me no good as the servos did not need that much power. I replaced the 7806 with an interesting setup for dual 7805 regulators wired in parallel, with heatsinks and 2 filtering 220uf caps and a filtering 100nf cap.

5.) The 12volt dc motors and PWM control boards get their power from 12 volt power source, not through a 7812 regulator like I was trying to use.

6.) Large diodes like the 1N4001 can help drop the input voltage down going into 7805 regulators by as much as a volt for each diode used. When you consider ever volt over what the regulator requires is often wasted as heat, diodes can come in very handy.

This method so far is working well for me. I did find it hard to find good reference sources for powering more than 2-3 servos from anything other than directly from a battery source rated for the needs of the servos. So I wanted to share what I learned from my experience.

Heatsinks are a MUST! Caps help a lot! Discussing your designs problems in a group like TRCY is a wonderful resource!

As an added note, a couple of good suggestions that the discussion in the TRCY group offered were to use a premade 1.5 amp regulator board: http://www.wrighthobbies.net/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=28&products_id=146, as suggested by Eddy Wright of http://www.wrighthobbies.net

And another interesting idea I might try in the future is to use an individual 7805 regulator for each servo. This prevents an overdraw of current and will help reduce heat. My dual setup works for, but considering how cheap 7805 regulators can be when purchased in bulk, it's an interesting design idea submitted by "David" AKA robots42

Another product I came across that looks promising is a 10w Adjustable Switching Regulator designed to fit in the space a of 78xx series regulator: http://www.robotshop.com/dimension-engineering-de-swadj-1.html

P.S. I want to thank HVLabs for posting their circuit design online, which is where I got the idea for my modified dual 7805 regulator setup. See the original circuit here: http://www.hvlabs.com/serservo.html

Christmas Came Early

So my wife and I are really terrible at waiting to give gifts, so we had our Christmas gift exchange last Sunday. My wife got me some really awesome robot related goodies!

I got some much needed new books, as you can see "The Power of Your Subconscious Mind", which I previously recommended as a good A.I. related book. I got "Hardware Interfacing with RobotBASIC", because I really want to learn more about this free software package called RobotBASIC. I got "Arduino + Android Projects for the Evil Genius" because my wife and I both have Android 2.2 tablets and I'd like to see if they can be used for robotics and while I dont have an Ardunino yet, this book might inspire me to get one.

My wife also got me some new wire ties, cause I use the heck out of wire ties! A nice new set of wire jumpers for bread boarding, a much needed new set of wire cutters with really comfortable grips and a Parallax Propeller Servo Controller USB.

Another interesting book I just got and is not pictured, is "Growing Up with Lucy, How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps", by Steve Grand. I'm looking forward to reading this and learning more about Steve's ideas and theories.

Can't wait to read all my books and play with my new toys.

Book reviews

I've been reading several book related to Artificial Intelligence with focus on human mind development. After all, if you seek to create a machine intelligence similar to the way to human mind works, it makes sense to study how the human mind works, develops and learns.

After reading several books, I have concluded that no one person know how the human mind works in it's full detail. Our human science simply does not tell us enough to copy or replicate the exact way the human mind works.

They are many theories on how the human mind works and I conclude that none of them are provided correct or false at this time. Whatever theory you prescribe to, in my opinion is no worse or better then any other. It comes down to matter of choice and which theory seems to match you design needs better.

I'm coming to the conclusion that to achive artificial intelligence, it might be more helpful to free our minds from the dogma of all the theories floating around and pick the parts we like we combine them in new ways to create new types of thinking machines.

One really good book I read was:
“Basic Instinct: The Genesis of Behavior”,
by Mark S. Blumberg, A neuroscientist at the University of Iowa, Copyright, 2005

--Darwin says roughly that, any action we take or make, without any experience and without any knowledge of why the action if performed, could be said to be an instinct or instinctive. --

This book was a really good study on instincts and if you want to study AI or robotics control I think you need to study instincts.

Another wonderful book I read was:
“The Power of Your Subconscious Mind”, by Joseph Murphy, Ph.D., D.D.
He was the Minister-Directory of the Church of Divine Science in Los Angeles for almost three decades, Copyright 2008

--You are the beliefs taking shape, image by image, light and shadow there in your subterranean darkroom (your subconscious). In a moral sense, you subconscious is totally neutral, willing to look on any habit as fitting, whether or not you are the world deem it good or bad. That is why when we blithely drop negative thoughts into our subconscious, into this darkroom of ours, time and time again, we are so surprised to see these dark thoughts finding expression in our day-to-day experiences and relationships…time and time again.--

This book really demystified for me what the subsconscious mind is and how it behaves.

This next books, had some interesting thoughts in, but I did not find it as helpful as the books I mentioned aboved.
“The Genius in All of Us” by, David Shenk
He is a author of other books and correspondent for TheAtlantic.com and has contributed to National Geographic, Slate, the New York Times, Gourmet, Harper’s, The New Yorker, NPR and PBS, copyright 2010

This books focus mostly on how our genes effect us, but in a dynamic way. The books a long way to explain that there are a lot of missconceptions about genes, for instance lets say both of your parents were doctors or lawyers, it does not mean that genetically you are predisposed to be a successful doctor or lawyer as well.


“Intelligence and How to get It”, by Richard E. Nisbett, copyright 2009, Professor at University of Michigan, Ann Harbor
Not a very good book for AI research, it does not make the subject easy to understand, the conclusions are not clearly defined and it focus a lot on education and the reasons for why school children take IQ tests and how the results are useful and how to apply them. The conclusions that are stated I don’t personally care for.

“Robot Intelligence: An Advanced Knowledge Processing Approach”, By Honghai Liu, Dongbing Gu, Robert J. Howlett and Yonghuai, Liu, copyright 2010
This book is awful for real world examples. It gives a very high level overview of outdated concepts. At the very little the concepts are at least 10 years old. It gives a lot of math. If you are wanting a PhD in physics and also interested in robotics, then this book might be a good bridge.

“The Birth of The Mind”, by Gary Marcus, copyright 2004
--Autodidact
The mechanisms that allow the brain to rewire its self get exploited internally. Internally generated signals are used to transmit types of test patterns to simulate sensory information to columns to neurons used for sensor processing. This allows babies to hone their sensory processing in the womb and helps the eye, ears and other sensory inputs to be calibrated and ready for live input.--

This book was awesome! It had a large section on how language works in our minds not just to form words and communicate but is also used in memory to help store large concepts. Language is also used to help use plan actions and rehears what we are going to do. This book is worth reading!

Hope you enjoy my book reviews.

as always, Happy Roboting! =)

New How to Videos

I post some new videos of the assembly process for the ArdBot robot kit/chassis from BudgetRobotics.com You might have seen this bot resently in Servo Magazine.

Pt1 Into
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzo8Qv2LR_0

pt2 x-wheel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wJ-fM-c0IY

pt3 Servo Bracket
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGXaL7PlcDA

pt4 Putting it all together
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PPam9Go5jU