Build Your Own Combat Robot

FIGURE 12-8
A fully autonomous
robot, named
1BDI, built to
compete in the
fire-fighting contest.
(courtesy of
Acroname)
Chapter 12: Robot Brains 271
Imagine trying to control the same robot with 12 sticks on the R/C transmitter
while trying to do battle with another robot that is speeding toward you. The computer-enhanced
R/C is crucial to sophisticated mechanical designs.
1BDI, an Autonomous Robot
1BDI takes the microcontroller control to the limit by completely controlling the
robot without a human operator. This robot was designed to find a lit candle in a
maze using vision, put out the candle using a fan, and then find its way out of the
maze using its memory of how it got to the candle in the first place. Figure 12-8
shows a photograph of this fire-fighting robot.
The heart of 1BDI’s control is a BrainStem controller that is running a TEA
program to read input from the sensors and to control the motors. The robot has
various sensors to find walls using infrared light, to find lines on the floor using reflected
light, and to sense whether the wheels have stopped spinning or not. 1BDI
also has a secondary microcontroller system driven by a BSX-24 microcontroller
that does vision processing from a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera similar to
what you might find in a hand-held commercial digital camcorder.
The CCD array takes an image, and the BSX-24 processes the data to seek out
the distinct shape of the candle. The BSX-24 can also distinguish yellow tubes
placed in the robot’s path that are meant to be color-keyed furniture for the robot
to avoid. The programming for autonomous robots is typically much more sophisticated
than that of microcontroller-assisted robots. Every possibility the robot
may encounter must be handled so that the robot is not easily disabled.
Building a robust autonomous robot is at the forefront of today’s research in both
robotics and artificial intelligence.