Cbot - Plant Maintainence Robot 1

Preliminary Development Projects

Updated 4/25/15

Key Search Words: ROBOT, ROBOTICS, ROBOTIC VISION, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AI

Here is an update on the current progress of the Cbot Robot. For the second half of April, I concentrated on developing the automatic battery charger and beacon so that we can keep the robot at full power during the next phase of testing. One of the most important functions a household robot must do is be able to find the battery charger, plug itself in, and charge itself up on a daily basis. For the Plant robot - this means that after it has completed its watering task every morning, it must return to the charger and slowly top off the 12v battery for the rest of the day and into the night. The next morning the Sun comes up - and we do it all over again. Below you'll find some photos of where we are at on this and an inside look at how the brains of the robot will accomplish the entire watering task!

Left: First thing was to construct a solid and reliable docking station, complete with 500 ma battery charger, an adjustable infra red beacon and two charging plates the robot can drive into to connect up. Here is a bench test of this in action. The docking station is on the left and has a red light just above the contacts to confirm there is voltage present. (13.5v to charge a Gel Cell). The robot on the right (without its dome) has two "feelers" made from a Guitar E string that are connecting to the plates. The battery is able to charge fine WHILE THE ROBOT IS ON. This allows the robot to just drive up and charge at will.
Here inside the robot arena, you can see the charger/docking station more clearly. The electronics are inside the metal box, and the dome at top has a bar of infrared LED lamps for the robot to home in on to park itself right on the plates.
Viewed from above, the guitar strings are just touching the plates and connect directly to the battery terminals in the robot. The white C shaped foam piece is connected to a lever switch. If the robot keeps driving towards the plates and does not stop because it detects no voltage, the switch closes and that will stop the robot. It is a fail safe.

Inside the docking beacon. The bottom board is a small 12F629 micro controller that puts out a constant 38.5 khz signal. This drives the second board which contains the IR LEDs.

Click to enlarge!
The docking beacon detector that is to be installed on the front of the robot started out like this, three pieces of brass shim stock soldered to form a vane sensor. Two photo cells that respond to 38.5 kHz Infrared light are on each side of the vane. by pointing the vane right at the beacon, both photocells will put out a signal. If its to the right or left - only one will thus the robot can home in on the beacon. This all gets painted flat black.
The beacon sensor now installed on the underside of the top plate of the robot.

A diagram to show how the robot is currently being programmed to accomplish the plant watering task. This type of diagram is called a "Finite State Machine". Each bubble is a separate state the robot can be in at any time, depending on what its doing. Each state is simply a separate block of code. The arrows show how it can jump from one state to another.

The human brain works in a similar manner. We mentally jump from one mind set to another all the time, say from walking to driving a car then talking on the phone. Each task we do is a separate mind state. Same here. This technique is very powerful in defining the artificial intelligence of microprocessor controlled systems.

Here is an example of whats inside each bubble above. This is for example the "Docked State" internal flow chart. Each bubble has its own internal diagram like this and you use it to guide you as you actually write the program to put into the robots micro processor. I have not finished ALL of the inner flow charts yet, but each step of the way is clearly defined for the future!

Interested in learning more on the development of this robot? Here are previous uploads:

Previous Articles
1. Plant watering sensors
2. Cbot basic concepts and project definition
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