A Flexible Robot Building Kit
The Flexible Robot Building Kit consists of a set of custom-made electronics:
At the heart is a processor board based on the
Motorola(TM) 68336 or 68376 processor. To this we can interface up to 4
sensor boards and up to 2 motor boards. This allows to build robots with
up to 256 analog sensors, 16 heavy duty actuators and 128 smaller actuators.
These properties are required for applications where the morphology of
a real robot has to be automatically modified in real time by the system
and therefore many actuators are required, as for example in the evolution
of the morphology of an insect eye. In addition, the robot building
kit is used to rapidly
build robots from some children's construction kit and in a dextrous
arm project as well as in a collaboration with ATR, Japan.
Parts of the robot building kit (the processor
board) are used by Neuronics Inc.,
a spin-off company of the AILab, for their commercial robot Samurai
and are also being sold separately to the general public.
