Category Archives: Robotics

Generative Art & Pen Plotters

Posted on May 31, 2022 by peter

Just operating my 3D printer have become a bit boring, so I’m interested in other uses for the gantry. Attaching a pen to the gantry to make a simple pen plotter seems like a worthy project. The plotting area will … Continue reading →

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Firefly Robots

Posted on October 13, 2021 by peter

Some fireflies exhibit a remarkable behavior where their flashes can synchronize with one another. I am interested in seeing if I can reproduce this behavior in small tabletop robots. These robots may use lights and light sensors to reproduce the … Continue reading →

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Robocars Racing

Posted on January 21, 2020 by peter

The other day a commenter to this blog’s signature included a reference to Robocar racing. I had never heard of that before and learned about an amazing activity involving developing and racing self-driving RC-style, scale-model cars. Robocars is sort of … Continue reading →

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Indoor Mobile-Robot Localization

Posted on July 26, 2019 by peter

The RomiPi project currently uses Aruco Tags for localization! While highly accurate, there are several limitations: cameras and vision are expensive, and visual obstructions limit use of cameras for certain carrying tasks. This pose will document various technologies and products … Continue reading →

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Introducing RomiPi: A ROS Package for the Pololu Romi

Posted on May 2, 2019 by peter

The Pololu Romi with 32u4 Control Board is a robust, low-cost (<$150), educational robotics platform that supports interfacing with the Raspberry Pi computing platform. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a robotics framework used throughout academics and industry which supports … Continue reading →

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Bigger Buttons for the Pololu Zumo!

Posted on January 25, 2019 by peter

The Pololu Zumo 32u4 is an excellent educational robotics platform, but its buttons proved difficult to manipulate for some of the students in my classes. I designed these bigger buttons as an add-on for the Zumo. My hope is that … Continue reading →

Posted in Projects, Robotics, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

ROS Melodic on Raspberry Pi 3

Posted on December 21, 2018 by peter

There is no build of ROS Melodic for Rasbian! There is no Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) Desktop build for Raspberry Pi 3! Now what? Here’s my answer: Flash an SD card with the Xubuntu image linked here (use balenaEtcher): ROS Melodic … Continue reading →

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Kuri Robot Notes

Posted on November 12, 2018 by peter

One of my colleagues had an interesting box, it turned out to contain a Kuri home robot from the shuttered Mayfield Robotics company. This post is a collection point for my notes on playing with it. I thought it might … Continue reading →

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Three-Robot Formation Localization

Posted on February 16, 2018 by peter

Visualizations of three-robot formation localizing using only range-only and range-bearing. I have recorded screencasts from Autodesk Fusion 360’s sketch view to help visualize the limits of the constraints. In the videos, the Hexagon represents a robot fixed at the origin … Continue reading →

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Manual Exposure Control of OpenCV Video

Posted on February 10, 2018 by peter

My experiments robot localization have been frustrated by blurry images. Blurry images have been making estimating the position of Aruco tag boards difficult with OpenCV. In my case, the camera is mounted to a moving robot that is photographing tags … Continue reading →

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