I built the turbot over two weekends, each session about 2.5 hours.  I did all the electronics on one afternoon and then found that I needed a drill, something that I did not have with me at the time (it being at my flat and me being at Ian’s).  The electronics were not particularly difficult, but there was considerable more parts than either of my previous robots and, as I found, the more parts, the greater the chance that you’re going to do something wrong.  I had a couple of close shaves with diodes almost soldered in the wrong way around, but both halves of the bot were successfully built in a couple of hours.

It then took another 2-3 hours to put the two halves of the body together with the battery pack and “legs”.  Holes needed to be drilled into the motors to attach it to the main body of the bot and the whole process was rather fiddly (and required 2 people to complete).  Once finished however, the turbot worked first time and we spent a happy half hour creating a little obstacle course in my living room for him to negotiate.

The turbot is a light-seeking robot with two motors, but instead of wheels it has two “legs” of differing lengths.  The shorter leg is bent in an L shape inside the longer leg which is also bent into an L shape.  These legs then rotate around the body, each leg “deciding”, based on the direction it wants to go in (toward the light) and what obstacles are in its way, whether to rotate clockwise or anticlockwise.  This unusual movement allows the bot to turn and climb in it’s own particular way.  It has light sensors on both sides of it’s body, so regardless of which side is up or down, it can still determine which direction to move in.

The Turbot Tumbler from Emily Toop on Vimeo.

I’ve demoed this bot to a few people and have been surprised by how little interest it’s generated.  I have to say it’s one of my favorite bots and I love it’s distinctiveness.  Maybe it’s problem is that in comparison to the sumobots (coming soon) it is rather simple and less fun, but I remain rather fond of him.

I went along with my friend Shardcore who took his video camera with him so that we could capture some of the bots for posterity.  I also took a disposable camera to get some photos, but sadly none of these came out.

CCNR is an interdisciplinary research group that involves both the Sussex Centre for Neuroscience and the Sussex Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems group. Their lab is a robotics hobbyists dream.  It’s little more than a small, dark room half way along an out of the way corridor in the school of Informatics, with Bill, the technician, tucked away in the corner.  There are workbenches running along every wall in this room and every surface (and quite a lot of the floor) is piled high with electronics parts, computers, bits of plastic and metal for building robot bodies and the carcasses of a few dead bots.

CCNR Labs from Emily Toop on Vimeo.

Intermingled with this was a few robots in progress that the group has received funding to build, including the bot that they take to schools to introduce schoolchildren to robotics and AI.

CCNR schoolbot from Emily Toop on Vimeo.

It also had a cnc machine that Shardcore used to make some funky octopi.

CNC machine at CCNR from Emily Toop on Vimeo.

Bill gave us a demo of some of their robots and explanations of how they work.  He was a mine of fascinating information and it was great to chat to him and get some tips on moving from kits and onto designing and building my own bots from scratch.  He is self taught himself, and it was really encouraging to know that you can get to that level without any formal tuition or experience.

Roller bot from Emily Toop on Vimeo.

Afterward, Linc took us to see the gantry robot, a robot he build for his phd.  It is a huge construction with a 360 degree camera that you programmed with actual insect movements plotted from psychology and biology experiments.  The robot would then mimic those movements, allowing researchers to see, from an insect point of view, the landmarks, path and trails that the insect was using to navigate.

The gantry Robot from Emily Toop on Vimeo.

I would really like to thank Linc and Bill for giving me the opportunity to visit the labs and see what they do there.  It was immensely inspiring and I enjoyed myself very much.

In the past, Girl Geek meetings would consist of a female business woman or technologist coming to the group and giving a 30-45 minute talk, followed by a buffet and some socialization (and rather a lot of booze from memory).  This was a lot of fun, but frequently the speakers were from outside of the Brighton area and spoke on topics that very few members of the group were passionate about.  What we wanted to create with the new group was a greater sense of sharing why we, as girl geeks from Brighton, classified ourselves as geeks and what we are passionate about.  It was this sense of a community collaborating and sharing the knowledge and interests within the group that we wished to foster.  Of course we still want to bring in new speakers from various areas of technology and the internet from around the world, but we also wanted to provide a forum from within the group as well.

In order to kick this off, I was somewhat volunteered to do the first event.  So on December 2nd 2008, I gave my talk; Batteries Not Included: A Beginners Guide to Building Robots.  Surprisingly for me, as I never present anything, it all went extremely well.  Despite a few technical hitches including some last minute soldering of one of the bots with a soldering iron borrowed off one of the attendees and porting the presentation from mac to windows just beforehand as the projector did not work with macs, the talk went smoothly, all the robots worked in the demo’s and everyone had a good time.

After the talk a number of people came up to me and said that being shown how simple it was to get started has inspired them to start robot building themselves.  This is exactly what I had wanted to achieve from both the talk and this blog and so it was heartening to hear people tell me that this had worked.  I am hoping to take the momentum generated by the event and use it to start a Brighton robotics group where enthusiasts and hobbyists can get together to share knowledge and experience and build their own robots.

Thank you everyone for making it such a good night.  You can watch the video that Rosie took of the event here.

Girl Geek Dinner - Emily Toop on Robots from Rosie Sherry on Vimeo.

Ribot provided lots of lovely refreshments and kindly videoed the whole thing, including my bit. Cheers guys, and cheers Ian and John for a great night.

I hope to rectify this today.

To catch up on the past 5 months of robot building I’m gonna give a quick overview of my menagerie of robots over the next few days.

Two weeks after completing Herbie the mousebot, I built a line follower.  He was a very simple line follower, but quite an order of magnitude more difficult to build than the mousebot.  There was a need for sawing, gluing, screwing things in and the result was far less professional looking than the kit style that Herbie had been.  In this respect I feel that Herbie was definitely the right place to start as it taught me things like soldering and how to bend and manipulate the parts on something which did not also need to have the main body board hand measured and cut.

Almost finished line follower (better photo to follow)

Once built it became obvious that the line follower had a major flaw, it was not balanced on it’s wheels and this meant that the front of the bot would rest on the floor and be pushed along by the motors. This was a problem largely because the front of the bot was where all the sensors were and having them dragging on the ground not only prevented the photoreceptors from picking up the bounced back light from the LEDs, but being nothing but receptors on the end of very thin, maleable wire, caused them to bend back on themselves and no longer be positioned correctly.  In order to resolve this issue, I glued a plastic measuring spoon to the base of the bot to support the front.  This solved the problem, but the spoon was rather too large and the front is now higher in the air that ideally it should be.

Problem number two on the line follower was largely our own fault.  Despite the instructions quite clearly stating that the line follower followed black lines on a white background (although there is a “reverse” mode that allows it to follow white on black), we assumed that it would be enough to run it following a black line on a beige surface.  This worked only intermittently, regardless of how many times I retuned it and I felt somewhat disillusioned.  It was only my second bot and I’d built a duff.  I got rather disheartened and didn’t build another robot for nearly 2 months.

As I found out later, the bot actually worked extremely well when run in the correct environment, but perhaps we’ll gloss over that for now shall we?

Tomorrow, The Turbot Tumbling Robot; velociraptor of the robot Jurassic Park

Before yesterday I had never held a soldering iron before.  The nearest thing I had ever come to any kind of engineering was putting together flat pack furniture, very very badly.  I have never had to learn any of these things because I am a girl and all I have had to do is bat my eyelids at the nearest available male and he has fallen over himself to demonstrate his manliness by doing all my DIY for me.  I know that’s not very p.c. but it is the truth none the less.  And yet there I was yesterday, needlenose pliers in one hand, 4.7k resistor in the other, handbuilding a robot.  And it was the most fun I’ve had in years.

First off, I am a geek.  I am a computer programmer and have written all sorts of software from trading platforms to mobile phone websites.  Robotics and AI have always fascinated me, but I have never done anything about it.  I learnt AI as part of my degree and so ANNs and GAs are not alien to me, but in my whole life I have never done more than try and solve simple toy problems with it.  I have avoided hardware like the plague.  It’s been frightening to me, largly due to my inexperience with anything practical.  And the people I have known who have been into this stuff have been rather intimidating.  If you did not know what a transistor did you were dismissed immediately.  It made it a very uninviting world to try and get involved with.  So I forgot about it and got on with my life.

Until about 4 months ago, when out of the blue my interest was reawakened.  This was largely thanks to my boyfriend, an AI programmer himself, who when I told him about my secret, long forgotten interest in robotics encouraged my to persue it.  So now I want to create and program robots that do cool and funky things.

But I needed somewhere to start, and sadly that required money to buys parts.  For the 2 months I have been trying to sell my car so that I have the money to buy bits.

Sadly, this has rather fallen flat on its face, cos who wants to buy a sports car when petrol costs a fortune and there’s a credit crunch on?  So I’ve been slowly getting frustrated waiting and boring all my workmates to death with my robotic plans.

But Friday was my birthday and my boyfriend got the hint and gave me a robot kit, Herbie the Mousebot from Solarbotics and so at last I am able to realise my dream.  This is going to be fun!