Building a Robot

[terfilip]

As Ho suggested we could build a robot as one of our first projects this year, so post your ideas here to we can come up with something more concrete. I’m thinking of building a simple wheel robot that we could then program to move in some path and demonstrate it to new people, making it both EE & CS. There are also a lot of videos on Youtube of people doing something like this with raspberry pi and they use simple python scripts to direct the robot(e.g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtKUSFqtFmE), there’s even one where they give such a robot a camera and using OpenCV they make it recognise a ball and figure out whether to move closer to or away from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dbzIAp1bE8 (although this one has no explanation). Anyway those are just some examples that we could think about.

Things to do:

• An introduction lecture. Find a person.

[HSkogmo]

What about something like this?

It's a Lego NXT and can be programmed in Java.

It has;

• Pressure sensors
• Distance sensors
• Motors, speed can be regulated
• Contrast sensors
• Sound sensors
• Can be accessed through Bluetooth
• It can report which degree it's standing in

[dimazest]

Great idea. Should we buy one of this? If there is enough interest, we can ask for funding. Again, let's have a dedicated "robotics" meeting.

[HSkogmo]

Sounds like a plan. We could apply for funding, but if we don't have the interest to back it, it might prove difficult. Who can take the lead on robotics?

[dimazest]

Preferably not me. What if we organize a spin off meeting, see how many people are interested and then tell them that they can apply for funding.

Could someone start a page similar to
https://github.com/qmcs/qmcs.github.io/blob/pelican/content/pages/scientific_coding.rst