= Glenn R. Currie = http://www.robotgroup.net/glenn/kd5mfw1.jpg Glenn Currie == About Me == I am on the Board of Directors of The Robot Group Inc. My day job is software design. I program in a variety of computer languages. I currently works for North Shore Circuit Design in Austin, Texas. I served as the editor for our weekly newsletter The Robot Group PULSE for about four years. I recently started publishing the PULSE newsletter again with the first new issue dated January of 1998. I put out a version of the newsletter when there seems to be enough "new"s. We hope to get those on the web again soon. Dweebvision Telepresence Robot: I built thethe group's first telpresence bot called Dweebvision and also am the co-creator of the Megabot Army series with Norman Annal. I has (yes it is still working) a Fisher Price Pixelvison camera attached to a 900MHz. audio / video transmitter. Dweeb sent back live video and sound. The auto level control in the Pixelvison camera worked perfectly - reducing the audio while the unit was driving around and the noisy plastic gear motors were on and increased the microphone sensitivity when the motor noice stopped. The chassis was made out of an "after Christmas" special 4 wheel drive truck from Radio Shack. The remote control for steering the truck was on ~27 MHz. and offered no interference for the 900 MHz. audio video transmitter. The unit would run for about 4 1/2 hours on one set of alkiline batteries. I added a xenon strobe to Dweeb for safety because all kids want to do with it is drive up behind someone and have them trip over the robot. Dweeb has been used in countless demonstrations over the years. I found attaching the camera and video transmitter with rubber bands and velcro was the way to go. Anything less flexable was trashed in no time. With rubber bands and velcro I simply pick up the "big chunks" of the robot after it has been stepped on and mash them back into place. Most schools have walls of enameled brick and Dweeb gives a great demo when driven between desk legs in near by classrooms. Dweeb is small and travels in a cardbord file box to school demos. Dweebvision was built, overnight, before Robofest III, after collecting all the parts over the period of a few months. It gets updated at times wiht a night vision camera and has been used to scout out problems under an ice rink and look for pets under houses. Dweeb is a telepresence device and is run by a remote operator. It has no on-board microprocessor or brain. When I was in school we called people with no apparent brain and a head filled only with that which was put there by others a "Dweeb". Robot Mobile Platform 1: Dweebvison was great but had limited payload capacity so, with the help of others, I built a larger platform with a payload capacity of greater than 300 pounds. The base is powered by two electric wheel chair motors and a custom motor controller. The motor controller, designed by Vadim Konradi, is microprocessor controlled, features a Proportional, Integral, Derivative(PID) loop algorithm and drives the motors with a custom dual H-Bridge. The control loop is closed useing optial encoders attached to the wheel chair motors via a flexable coupling. MP1 is controlled by sending ASCII commands to the Motorola 68HC11 controller. This is currently done using a remote control computer running the Linux operating system to read a joystick and send commnad via a pair of radio MODEMs to the MP1. Audio and video are sent back using the Dweebvison 900 MHz. RF link. The audio is captured by the sound card and the video is captured using a video frame grabber. The Linux video frame grabber device driver was written by Carlos Puchol. The captured video is displayed in real time in an X-Window on the Linux console. Therefore, the control data and audio and video telemetry are in digital form and ripe for further manipulation on the Linux box. I am currently upgrading the Linux hardware platform as well as moving to 802.11b wireless netowrking to take the place of the old radio MODEMs. The Robot Brain project described below is being developed to provide a better brain for the MP1. I hope to have some photos up on the WEB soon. The Robot Brain: The Robot Brain project is large project to with the goal of providing a platform to test various robot control theories. It is in it's early stages but conisists of an ever growing number of Linux and BSD based computers networked together. The collection of rack mount computers strapped togehther form the fixed brain for various mobile robot bases. I am currently working on getting "agent" based software running on the "Society" of machines . I am convinced that interesting things can be done with the concept of "agents" introduced by Marvin Minsky in his boook "Society of Mind". This is a project that I plan to work on for as long as I am around. I need all the help I can get and many friends and members of The Robot Group have already contributed greatly to the project and I owe them my thanks. I was also the system administrator for the group's BBS system called "BOCK" circa BW. (Before the web) BOCK was one side of a twin UNIX server that consisted of systems "SHINER" and "BOCK". The names came from the Bock beer brewed by independent Texas brewery, Shiner. Drink up.