Hi everyone! I'm new to LMR. I got into robotics a few years back when something hit me. "Hey! I know what I can do this summer! I'll read books on robots and learn how to build them!" So that's what I did!
This is my main project - NINA. I'm building this robot with a friend. Nina is meant to be a large scale domestic robot. It runs on treads, wheelchair motors, my laptop computer, a microphone and a camera. Right now, I'm taking apart this prototype and building something that's more light weight, less dangerous, and more efficient.
NINA's current treads came from Lynxmotion. However, the sprockets are a little too flimsey, so I'm switching to conveyor belt material and aluminum pulleys.
Nina uses a sabertooth 25 Amp duel motor controller, interfaced to her laptop "brain" via usb cord. She also uses a wireless radio receiver to listen to voice commands from a headset microphone. Her laptop controller runs roborelam, a vision processing software, which is plugged into a python API script. In her python script, I use a handy speech module developed by a friend of mine on Daniweb.com! It's a very fun and useful piece of software!
In the next design, I'm using two electric bicycle motors and Ni-hm batteries instead of SLA.
I'm also going to give this robot an arm and two cameras for stereoscopic vision, along with a load of IR and Sonar proximity sensors.
Here's a short video to demonstrate what NINA can do so far! (By the way, sorry for the poor lighting. I promise to get better lighting in the next video).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w2MSClTjU0