Al's Robotics.... The Robux Project

Robux Project

The Robux Project has been set out to provide a forever-expandable platform. With the basic idea of having a 2 or 4 wheel drive rover (with the possibility of legged robots in the future), that uses either a ITX board or laptop for the main processing. With modular motor controls, sensors systems and positioning systems. Everyone will be able to either choose off the self modules or design modules that best fit their needs and customize as needed while retaining the common base platform, as it has been put by some “a Linux for robots”, thus hence the name of the project, Robux.

This project will enable many off the self, low cost modules to be combined together to produce an advanced robotics platform with increasing expandability options as software and hardware developments are made.

To make this possible there will be one main central processing unit that will be responsible for controller subsystems within the robot. These subsystems will consist of sensors, motor controllers, odometry, speech systems and many more that all contain an element of intelligence to provide data in a usable format for main processor. Where possible these subsystems will be combined with pre-processors which will enable a type of "instinct reaction" to the environment.

Instinct Reaction Example: if an object is hot then the natural reaction is to move away from that object, this is what we will try to implement in this project along with many other things.

A word document has been put together with some basic outlines of the project that will be added to stage by stage. To view this document, please download the file below.

Control Structure

Preliminary release version 1.0

Software, Firmware and Programming.

Seeing as this project is set out to be free and open to everyone it is fitting that Linux be used as the chosen OS of the main processing unit. However this is truly a project for everyone and windows 2000 will also be used. This will give people a choice.
The programming to be used within Linux is yet to be decided. However for the windows version it is most likely that VB will be used.

Latest news, we now have the control structure for the interfaces between microcontrollers and PC platform. This is a downloadable DOC, click here for more information

The basic idea is to give ever microcontroller an IP address so that it may be individually addressed over Serial, I2C, SPI, Ethernet etc. each packet contains the total packet length, packet type, user data and CRC.

My Robux, Plans and info

My Robux, I have set-up a new page to detail the mechanical hardware (i.e. the chassis etc) that I am building for my attempt. see more here

Support

This is one of those projects that is going to need a lot of input. The project is open to everyone that has an interest in it. There is a discussion about the Robux Project over at Robot Builder, http://www.robotbuilder.co.uk/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=600

There is to be two versions of x86 control, one will be written for a Linux Robot and the other for a Windows robot.

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