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The BitESC is a small electronic speed controller for those little RC cars like the MicroSizer / BitChar-G. It can be used in a small RC plane to have some control over the speed of the motor. The speed of the motor ramps up or down, depending on which of the buttons on the transmitter you press. If no button is pressed, the ESC will ramp the throttle down to a stop after a few seconds. This safety net comes in handy when the plane flies out of transmitter reach.

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This walking robot is powered by SMA (Shape Memory Alloy) actuators. SMA is also called nitinol, flexinol or muscle wire. Although I knew muscle wire existed for some time, I did not experiment with it because of its high power requirements that are almost not reachable in sub 10 cm robots. After reading about the usage of muscle wire in an artificial lobster (Neurotechnology for Biomimetic Robots) I got interested again in the subject.

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Killerbee is my first attempt at building a nano sumo bot. These bots have a maximum dimension of 25×25x25 mm and a maximum mass of 25 grams.
Killerbee uses a custom build gearbox based on 2 small hobby servos. Its brains are a ATMega8 clocked at 16MHz. Power comes from a 90mAh LiPo battery. It has two line sensors at the bottom and one object sensor, on the front. A custom connector at the back provides an ISP programming interface a serial communication port and two terminals to charge the battery. A small SMD switch allows the bot to be switched on/off.

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The ladybug uses two motors from a salvaged hobby servos from which the gears were broken. It does not use any gearbox at all, but relies on the small wheels to have a decent speed. I have to say that this approach works and is also used in some commercial (toy) robot kits (velleman running bug). The only drawback I had was the relative high power consumption of the servo motors. The choice of the batteries was limited due to the small size of the body. I had to settle with some non-chargeable button batteries to power the electronics and some AAAA batteries (rather small) for the two motors.

The brains are (again) a AT90S2313 from Atmel, running at 10Mhz, the motor driver is a L293D, a dual H-bridge with build-in clamp diodes.

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To date, this is my most successful design. It is powered by an Atmel 8535, which means you can write fairly complex applications (8Kb flash). It has 4 tactical sensors, two eyes based on LDR resistors placed in a tube to have directional sensory, one RC5 Ir diode to be able to command the robot using a standard remote control unit and expansion bus on the top of the vehicle (Wireless module has been build).




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This is one of the most unconventional designs I’ve build up to date. It does not run straight, but crawls. The reason for this is that both motors are unidirectional. It uses two wristwatch lavet-type motors as it main actuators and uses two whiskers and two directional LDR light sensors for sensing it’s environment. The biggest problem with robot is the fragile connection of the wheels to the shaft of the engine.

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This robot is build using small stepper motors that are actually used within the dashboard of VolksWagen cars. I bought them at http://www.didel.com, where you can find a lot of other interesting robot stuff. They don’t generate a lot of torque, but seem to be sufficient to drive a small autonomius vehicle. An other plus is the low power consumption, a simple 9V battery can drive the system for more then a full day.

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The first robot I build, with the next characteristics:

• slow
• power hungry
• expensive
• useless sensors
• a lot of fun to build and program

The actuators of this vehicle are two small hobby servos, patched for continuous rotation. It uses a tracked driving mechanism, like a tank, in which a third drive wheel and a driving belt makes the wheels turn. It uses two Ir proximity detectors (SFH900, Siemens), two Ir ambient light detectors(Ir Photo LED) and two pairs of whiskers as the main sensory equipment (Guitar string). Power is drawn from two NiMH 3.6V CMOS batteries and guarantees at least 10 minutes of continuous operation wink It has a piezo speaker for making squeaking noises and even has a plug for charging the batteries … Oh, before I forget, it’s brains are a Atmel AVR 2313 running at 4Mhz and the motors are driven by a L293D H-bridge.

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