Carrick Detweiler

In the final project for my CSCE 236 Embedded Systems course the students added markers to their Arduino robots that they have been building over the course of the semester and taught them how to draw.  There were two drawing events.  The first day I gave students a set of serial commands describing the motions to draw some simple pictures (a spiral and the letters “CS”).  The second day each group designed their own picture to draw.  Each robot had a compass and wheel encoders to get heading and distance information, although many groups decided to simply time turns instead of relying on the compass since it was noisy and difficult to calibrate.  The students worked very hard over the course of the semester learning how to interface, configure, and program embedded system.  And, of course, they also had significant experience debugging code, electrical, and mechanical problems, all of which make robotics so much fun!

Below are some videos of the robots in action, you can also see pictures of the final results.

Perhaps this one should be the new department logo:

Can’t say I ever played Portal (after my console gaming time), but for all those fans, this was a very nice result with Arduino-driven music as well:

The speed that they drew this one was impressive:

This is one of a few flowers that this robot ended up drawing:

Turtle and sun:

The spiral from the first day of the competition:

And, of course, you need to make sure to start in the right location:

A while back we held a workshop with our robotics students and UNL dance students to explore the interaction of technology and dance.  This was part of a collaboration with the Pilobolus Dance Company and went along with their performance at the Lied Center.  On Friday, April 27 at 7pm there will be a segment on NET Television that documents this collaboration as part of the NET series entitled NEBRASKA STORIES.  It will also be posted online after it airs and we will be sure to post the link.

And here is the video:

A while back Brent’s paper was accepted at ICRA:

B. Griffin and C. Detweiler. Resonant Wireless Power Transfer to Ground Sensors from a UAV. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2012, Accepted.

We will be there presenting this work next month in St. Paul Minnesota.  There is also a video that goes along with the paper:

We are currently making a lot of progress in the NIMBUS Lab developing sensors and control systems to autonomously align the flier to optimize the power transfer.  Hopefully we will be posting results on that work over the summer.