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The itsy bitsy spider Crawled up the water spout Down came the rain And washed the spider out Out came the sun And dried up all the rain And the itsy bitsy spider Crawled up the spout again |
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| [ | What Is This? | | | What Is ITSY? | | | Proposal | ] |
| What Is This? |
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This webpage is the secondary source of documentation for my fourth year Electrical Engineering design project at Carleton University. The design project is a requirement for all fourth-year Engineering students, although each project is unique. The coursecode for the project is 97.497; the supervisor for my project is Mr. Tom Ray. The design project is self-assigned: the fourth year student selects an area of interest to him/herself and, with faculty approval, designs and completes a project relevent to that field of study. The grade assigned to the student is based on a comprehensive report that includes appropriate drawings, charts, bibliography, and etc. Many fourth year projects are suggested by professors and instructors, in fact very few design projects not supplied by the faculty were accepted - mine being one of those. |
| What Is ITSY? |
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My fourth year project is the design and construction of a small autonomous low-cost six-legged walking robot, codenamed ITSY. ITSY will be approximately sixteen inches long, stand five to eight inches off the ground, and weigh a little less than two pounds. The system overview has more information about the specific goals and motivations for this project. The mechanical design consists of the body, but more interestingly, the modular legs. Each of the six legs uses two independently controlled servomotors to achieve two degrees of freedom per leg. This will allow ITSY to move with several different gaits: a slow "stalking" gait, a normal "walking" gait, and perhaps a faster "trotting" gait. The complex electronic control system uses an MIT HandyBoard with embedded Motorola MC68HC11 processor, two Serial Servo Controllers, a custom lightweight power supply, and more than fifteen sensors building a 'world-model' view of the robot's surroundings. ITSY will be programmed using a technique known as subsumption architecture, where behavior patterns are layered in order of urgency. The behavior of the overall system is the result of the interaction of many simple action-reaction rules. The robot 'reacts' to sensor input and an internal modeled view of the outside world. |
| The Proposal |
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The fourth-year design project proposal was submitted and accepted during the last week in September, 1998. The table of contents, with appropriate hyperlinks, follows. Estimated design time is 16 weeks, with another 4 weeks allocated for construction. PROJECT COMPONENTS |