Hello all

Let me introduce myself first. I’m a guy (62 yr of age) from the Netherlands. I work at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the department of Building Engineering.  During my work, I got a small fund to do research after the usability of small robots. The time was too short and my knowledge about robotics too little. But that research lights the fire, so I am still developing robots in my spare time. I read a number of papers and books about the subsumption architecture of Brooks. At the moment I finished programming (python) of the robot. At the moment  I'm assembling the hardware, on the base. Next will be the wiring of all the components.

The robot is build of a raspberry pi (brains) and an Arduino (sensors), 3 audio sonars, 1 infrared light 2 decoders of the wheel movement, compass, acceleration sensor, pi or pixy camera and a lidar lite “radar”. The cam and/ or the lidar will be used for target finding., the sonars for the avoidance of obstacles (collision detection).

Future ideas to implement: audio react to speech or noises, a small robotic arm to pick up items and bring them to a special zone. And as an ultimate goal, the robot keeps track of its power consumption and when the battery is too low it will go to a recharging station.

The Dutchman