PalmBot

built by Justin Osborn


Click on an image to enlarge it
Target Environment	Locomotion Method
Indoors	4 Wheels
Sensors / Input Devices	Actuators / Output Devices
bump sensor IR distance sensors (planned)	2 drive servos pneumatic gripper (planned)
Control Method	Power Source
Autonomous	Battery
CPU Type	Operating System
Palm (Motorola 68K 16mhz)	PalmOS
Programming Lanuage	Weight
C	N/A
Time to build	Cost to build
3 months	$100 (not including Palm)
URL for more information
http://www.mbhs.edu/~josborn/palmbot/
Comments
PalmBot is based on the PPRK orginally developed by Greg Reshko at CMU. I liked his idea of controlling a robot with a Palm, mostly because it meant I could buy a fairly inexpensive motor controller (in this case the Pontech SV203), instead of a whole microcontroller with processor and memory. The Palm gives you a nice LCD, lots of processing power, and plenty of memory. However, I didn't want to pay $300 for the whole kit. Instead I designed my own robot that cost under $100 to build. Each servo drives a gear which turns a belt that turns the gears attached to the wheels. It's a tank-style drive system. So far, it only has a bump sensor in the front (consisting of two microswitches with a polycarbonate bumper glued to them). I'm planning to add FischerTechnik pnuematics shortly, as well as IR distance sensors.

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