A Different Kind of Robotics Project

[Andrew Remmers]

Hey Guys!

I am currently working on a new project with a fellow student, and we finally got our website up! Even though its pretty basic right now we are working on setting up a gallery and such!

http://networkbot.wordpress.com/

This robot is the brain child of Chris Willingham. He came to me one day and explained this idea of a robot that would be controlled through the internet! I loved the idea and having some free time made a quick robot base, from that point on we have decided that we are going to try to build it and hopefully market it at some point.

Design changes are in our near future as we have figured out better ways for construction, and have some functions we want to add.

Currently the robot has a kiwi drive on a "unibody" nonagon chassis
The Robot will also feature a small telescoping arm, this will allow the user to adjust the level of the netbook on the top of the arm to eye level with different users.

Features we would like to add in the future:

- Universal Charging Docks
- Kinect 3D mapping
- Opening/closing doors which might also be used to manipulate objects depending on design

Comments, Questions and Concerns are appreciated!

- Andrew

P.S. I know its not the best resolution picture, but here is a picture of the base

[Marc S.]

Aren't all FRC robots controlled by the internet? I know there not actually connected to the internet but its the same concept your describing right? In this case you just want to control it from an isolated location too far away to be controlled within reach of the control-board's/network's signal(and are comping for it by adding the kinect camera to see where your going). Or am i missing the objective?

Does this robot have a wireless router on board?

[JohnSchneider]

"nonagon" "three wheeled"

Where have I seen that before...

[tonystark_23]

Internet and LAN are not the same thing. Wireless communication does not need to utilize the "internet" in a sense.

[clwillingham]

Aren't all FRC robots controlled by the internet? I know there not actually connected to the internet but its the same concept your describing right? In this case you just want to control it from an isolated location too far away to be controlled within reach of the control-board's/network's signal(and are comping for it by adding the kinect camera to see where your going). Or am i missing the objective?

Does this robot have a wireless router on board?

both the FRC robots and the Netbot are controlled through WiFi, but the difference is the control system. There is no wireless routers on board, instead we just have an everyday laptop strapped onto the top of the robot. Everything is controlled through the laptop. using the laptop as the processor, we can make the robot do pretty much anything we want, we could even install Skype and drive the robot around using the Skype API. Eventually we plan on providing a simple API that allows developers to control the robot using any system they wish

The Kinect cameras are an idea we had for doing more complex image processing, since most laptops have a built in camera, you could probably use that if you wanted to actually control the robot through the Internet.

while the original objective when i started playing on the concept was to build a web controlled robot, however the Objective sort of changed as we developed the robot. you can check the website to see more of what we're aiming for now, but the basic idea is to make a reliable robotics platform that can be modified to do pretty much anything you want.