Using Old Disk Drive Motors

Hobby Robotics

Hobby roboticists have been around almost as long as computer enthusiasts. They are the ultimate tinkerers, often turning inexpensive or used parts into highly autonomous robotic systems. The success of Lego's Mindstorms™ robot kits, which were developed in collaboration with MIT, punctuates the growing fascination of kids and grown-ups alike with building robots of their own. Then there is the huge success of robot competitions including robot soccer tournaments and robot demolition derbies (e.g. BattleBot).

Just like an industrial manipulator, a medical robot or a haptic device, hobby robotics is about mechatronics, requiring skill in and passion about electromechanical design and software.

Most hobby robots, though not all, have a relatively simply microcontroller (such as Motorola's 68HC11, Parallax's Basic Stamp), rather than the typical high speed microprocessor found in industrial robot controllers (e.g. Motorola 68040 in Adept controllers, PowerPC in Fanuc controllers, etc.).

Often, relatively inexpensive motors and sensors are found on these robots. Some of these robots employ high torque motors found on hobby racecars.

Hobby roboticists are excellent recyclers, often reusing components salvaged from used or surplus disk drives, radios, calculators, etc.

Images courtesy of CMU's Robotics Institute

Regardless of the costs of the system, many of these kit robots have interesting design and performance. Take for example the robot in the above image. This is a PalmPilot-driven robot developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, which has garnered a great deal of recent press. This is a robot with three omni-wheels, which can rotate in two orthogonal directions, leading to a holonomic design in the sense that the robot can move in any direction at any time (typical wheels can only rotate in the plane normal to its axis, which is a non-holonomic constraint, so that it cannot always from from a given starting point to a given stop point in a direct path). The robot has a Pontech SV203 board for motor and IR sensor control and a PalmPilot for high level control. The use of a popular PDA for control provides relatively powerful computing and a graphical user interface at a low cost. More details about the software and hardware design can be found at CMU's website. Acroname is currently selling an unassembled kit as well as a preassembled version of this robot...

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