Robotics Company Plans to Market Arduino-based Robot
Rampage Robotics was created with the goal of introducing low-cost educational and hobby robots. As seen below, a modular design allows for the rapid development of basic or complex robots by the simple adding or swapping of circuit boards.
They're coming!
Four wheel drive robot with dual h-bridges controlling four motors for differential steering. ATmega168 microcontroller running at 16mhz. Arduino shield compatible headers to allow for stackable shields and protoboards. Zigbee socket for wireless bootloading or USB for wired programming. Quadrature encoders on each side for dead reckoning.
The protoshield allows for rapid development of new sensor modules. This shield incorporates a digital compass, accelerometer and IR remote receiver. A simple IMU can be developed using only these parts. One can easily explore the viability of any broken out sensor such as those sold by Sparkfun.
Speech/MP3 Playback can be added by using a Sparkfun Logomatic v2 and a VS1053 MP3 Decoder. By utilizing these two modules and an accelerometer, one can program the robot to say certain phrases when events occur. For example, when you pick up the robot off the floor it can say "Hey! Put me down!" or "Oww" when it bumps into a wall.
With the addition of the Logomatic v2 in the Speech example, we quickly realized that more powerful processors can be added in tandem with the base module ATmega168 microcontroller. Sparkfun offers a Altera Cyclone II Breakout Board and with a baseboard shield which includes SDRAM and Flash, one can take advantage of the soft-core processors that Altera, Xilinx, or Opencores.org offers.
For more picture, please see my flickr set here.
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