OMNIBOT!

 

Well almost… Ive been making an tri-omni-wheel robot that will follow me around! I had this wonderful idea when wandering about the Anna Swartz gallery in Sydney. What do the beautiful polished concrete floors need more than a robot that follows you around marking your path with a fluro coloured sand trail! Oh so great. I’m told that I might get killed if i actually do it, but im going to make my followbot anyway and test him in some other galleries first 🙂

So to start with I got my hands on 3 lego next Omni wheels with a servo adaptor. 3 servos. and used some vex structural parts to make this:

 

It is controlled by an Arduino Fio via an Android phone. Tronixstuff has an excellent tutorial on using bluetooth bee with blue term. The bluetooth bee fits into the existing fio xbee slot.

In this state it is pretty much functioning as a remote control car. The next step was to give it some eyes so it could see the world and navigate around it. I decided to try out the wiimote ir pixart camera and test are going well.

 

He follows! But not perfectly, yet anyway. There is some info about the Pixar camera, but not a lot. Have a look at these pages:

Removing camera from wiimote

Kako original pixart notes

Arduino wii camera library and schematics

If you dont want to take your wiimote a part yourself, they have done it for you over at Rocketbrand.

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