Student Research & Development Projects..no matter your age or skill level! 

Robotics Stimulates Maths, Science and Technology  Learning

Robots & robotics are now recognized as an important learning and research tool and are already being integrated into many school, college, and University  course curriculums. They have especially add a new and existing stimulation and adds and new motivation to learning Maths, Science and Technology subjects. Robots re-enforces the learning processes offering a more practical rather merely otherwise theoretical based learning process.   This 'hands-on' practical approach offers and new learning dimension and enthusiasm into the classroom. Already widely programming, electronics, mechatronics and artificial life simulation and biomimetics. 

Robot Project Examples

Here are some ideas that you could use as a term or year-end project in your School,  College or University.  

Floor plan mapping: using Radio modem,  transmit dimensions of a floor plan back to PC CAD drawing package.

Robot Tag and robot war gaming strategies: Develop your own 'Robot Tag' game using the  IR Control Freak that transmit unique ID's for each robot and team. The robots can identify 'friend' or 'foe'. Specific data codes are used to 'ZAP'  the opponent robots. Robot's can  also communicate with each other using the IR Control Freak™ module.  See white Paper - Robot Tag 

Robocode Wiki - (strategy games)

Balance robots:  Build and race balancing robots around an obstacle course with ramps! An excellent exercise for any physics class!

Medical thought Processes Simulation

Simulate thought processes that are required to balance a robot on two wheel two legs:

Fuzzy Logic development & simulation Using the IR Control Freak™ Module you can develop and simulate your own rule structure and rule matrix. See: FUZZY LOGIC - AN INTRODUCTION  by Steven D. Kaehler

School, College, University Project Support  We are interested to support Schools, Colleges and Universities with a good project idea. Your organization can apply for a Beta Test Program. Please download the application form here and email to support@robotmaker.co.uk for evaluation

Robots Swarms and Robot flocking:   

Use the MEGAbitty controller to develop a nano-class robot. There are a lot of interesting research projects going on in this area at the moment. 

Project Collective Microrobotics

At Stuttgart University the “Collective micro-robotics team” aims to explore new and innovative principles of information and knowledge processing, adaptation and learning for the design and development of very limited autonomous systems. These systems represent the result of miniaturization process in such fields as robotics, micro- and embedded controllers, sensor networks, non-destructing control, environmental monitoring, ubiquitous systems, medical research and several nano-technological areas. Not only software aspects, but also a development of corresponding hardware represent the first point of our research.

In the second point they will focus on self-organizing phenomena in technical, in particularly micro-robotic systems. They believe that artificial self-organization has an enormous potential: the self-organizing systems are cheaper, more reliable, flexible and scalable in comparison to other types of systems. 

Design and implementation of self-organizing and self-assembling artifacts.

Swarm-bots is a project sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies program of the European Community (IST-2000-31010), aimed to study new approaches to the design and implementation of self-organizing and self-assembling artifacts.

The project, that lasted 42 months, was successfully completed on March 31, 2005. It has been selected as one of the success stories of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) program of the European Commission.

One project concept would be to "enable embodied research into large scale distributed robot, sensor networks and massively distributed robotics connected over the Internet."

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When space is limited a three dimensional flexible printed circuit boards are required to produce a compact design. In this example small watch motors where use to drive the robot.

http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/MFI/

http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/milli-robot.html

Millibot
This link to the paper below. presents the design of a localization system for a team of centimeter-scale robots (Millibots) that collaborate to map and explore unknown environments. The localization system uses ultrasound to measure the distance from each moving robot to three stationary robots that serve as beacons. From these distance measurements the position of the robots is derived using a trilateration algorithm. The robot team can move over large distances by using a 'leap-frog' approach in which different robots serve as beacons at different times. 

The localization system is able to obtain position estimates more accurate than can be achieved through dead reckoning, and yet, does not require any landmarks or previously deployed beacons.

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~cyberscout/new-www/publications/FSR99.pdf

Other references for Millibots are:

Pradeep Khosla, the Philip and Marsha Dowd Professor of Engineering and Robotics and head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at PITTSBURGH-Carnegie Mellon University talks about the Milibot concept. 

http://octopus.ius.cs.cmu.edu/~millibots/millibot_video/millibots_media_pradeep.mpg

http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~rjg/millibots/millibot_project.html

http://octopus.ius.cs.cmu.edu/~millibots/millibot_video.html

Alice

Sandia

Liam

Smoothy