Latham Robotics Projects
At the time, there are a few projects going on. As this website progresses, I'm sure literally everything about autonomous mobile robots will be addressed.
Here's some projects that are currently being worked on as well as future project plans.
I you would like to add any information to particular aspects of the projects being worked on, please send an email, use my contact form, make a comment on my blog, or just visit the Latham Robotics forum. Somewhere in there, we can share some ideas.
Line Follower(s)
The line follower I built was a fun project to build, but after entering a couple contests, I quickly found out that there's a lot more I could do with a line following robot.
Here's a picture of the robot. If anyone would like to try building this robot, you can purchase the book, Robot Building for Beginners
Read more about my first line follower robot by going to my Blog.
Future Line Follower
I've seen some really fast line following robots. It is awsome to watch them go around the track looking like a slotcar race. They go so fast that they actually overshoot the line when it they take a corner, but the programming and number of sensors gives such a great degree of line sensing sensitivity that they can recover and find the line again, continuing on like nothing happened.
I really want to make one of these. It will be real fun. I am planning on using at least 5 light sensing (either IR transmitter/receiver pairs or a combination of LEDs with Light Dependent Sensors). The motors will have to be fast, but not too fast; the wheels will have to have really good traction, and the Arduino Duemilinove micro-controller should react fast enough to make a really fast line follower.
Autonomous Mobile Robot
I wanted to build a mobile robotic platform that would be very versatile as to the amount and placement of components. What I came up with is similar to the "very expensive" surveillance robots many robot companies are selling. I like the platform I made and it looks so cool to me that I put a picture of it on the front page. This is because it embodies the ral purpose for building autonomous mobile robots. That is to senseand manipulate its environment to safely navigate from one point to another in the real world.
The picture makes it look much larger than it is. It is only about 18 inches square. After further development of this robot, I plan to enter it into some Robo-magellan contests.
You can read more about this autonomous mobile robot here and to see the images of the parts and processes used to build this robot here.
"Enzo" - Artificially Intelligent Robot
This is a huge project that has been in development for a while. I did a lot of work on building the base, which will be the drivetrain for moving his 75+ pounds around. You can see pictures of the base actually being built here, and read more about Enzo here.
The picture you see here is the base shell, torso shell, and the animatronic Elvis head I plan on revising to mount it onto Enzo. The eyes move and blink; the head turns left and right, and the lips twich.
The shell parts were fabricated by building a cardboard model and fiberglassing over the cardboard. Once the bondo and paint are applied, Enzo will look very cool.
