= 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 work 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. It has (yes it is still working) a Fisher Price Pixelvison camera attached to a 900MHz. audio / video transmitter. Dweeb sends back live video and sound. The auto level control in the Pixelvison camera works perfectly - reducing the audio while the unit is driving around and the noisy plastic gear motors are on and increases the microphone sensitivity when the motor noise stops. The chassis is made out of an "after Christmas" special 4 wheel drive truck from Radio Shack. The remote control for steering the base is on ~27 MHz. and offeres no interference for the 900 MHz. audio video transmitter. The unit runs 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 nearby 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 with 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". The Megabot Army: When we give demos at schools, the kids always ask about a robot kit. Robots get expensive very quickly. The Megabot Army was an attempt to build a 6 foot tall robot out of regular cardboard you would fold up something like you assemble a cardbord file box. Norman Annal did much of the design which was fed into AutoCAD. The output file was used to drive a CNC prototype box cutter at Capitol Container in Buda TX. just south of Austin. Capitol Container cut about a dozen of the robot kits for us and seveal have been assembled and used in various displays. The nice thing about having the drawings in AutoCAD is that we can adjust the size easily. One 3 foot tall version of the Megabot was built. I need help on this project. It has been in the attic since Robofest 7. Many thanks to Capitol Container - those folks and make anything out of cardboard. 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 pulse width modulation through 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 based controller. This is currently done using a remote control computer running the Linux operating system to read a joystick and send commnads 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 in the Linux box. 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. A key improvement over Dweebvision is the control data, and audio / 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 networking 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 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 NetBSD based computers networked together. The collection of rack mount computers are strapped together via ethernet to form the fixed brain for various mobile robot bases. I am currently working on getting "agent" based software running on this "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. Latest Robot Brain update: I added a new server to the brain net (Sibyl1) 10-27-2002. That extra hour with the time change really helped this weekend We should fall back an hour each weekend. I reworked the power wiring to take advantage of the UPS I repaired last week. I was 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 once consisted of systems "SHINER" and "BOCK". The names came from the Bock beer brewed by independent Texas brewery, Shiner. Drink up. I enjoy backpacking, sailing, SCUBA diving and world travel. I am an an active amateur radio operator, call sign KD5MFW. I work with the ARCHES program in Austin and Travis County. We provide voice and packet (data) connections for area hospitals. As part of Travis County ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) we provide a variety of emergency communication services in our area. If there is a storm in the area, our storm chasers are out - night or day. We also train with the local Starflight crews - 5 - 7 minutes and the Starflight paramedics can get an injured person to an area hospital, but they need a place to land to pick up the patient, so we have a Landing Zone class regularly. If that were not enough, with others, I maintain (in my office at North Shore Circuit Design), a digipeater digital radio link repeater.