Portland Area Robotics Society

Regular Meeting Minutes

February 2, 2008, 10:30AM 

Agenda:

1.      PDXBot 08 Update

2.      Presentations: 

a. AHRS update for the RoboMagellan BOOTSTRAP Project %G–%@ Mark Gross

3.      Show and Tell

Announcements

1.  PDXBOT 08 Update

            We have the Doubletree Hotel reserved for Saturday, May 17th.  Sunday, May 18th will be the RoboMagellan Competition.  Promotion of PDXBOT.08 will begin soon.  Anyone interested in leading the planning and organization should contact Robert Scheer.

Presentations

Attitude Heading Reference System (AHRS) %G–%@ Mark Gross

Provide a 1% accurate generalize Attitude Heading Reference System (AHRS) for use in mobile robotic application. The target application is the BOOTSTRAP RoboMagellan Project.

 

Full details of the project are available on Marks website:

http://www.thegnar.org/ahrs/AHRS.html

 

The full presentation is also available:

http://www.thegnar.org/ahrs/ahrs_overview_2_2_08.pdf

Show and Tell %G–%@ Highlights

Dale Weber gave an update on his Robot, W.A.L.T.E.R. Along with a little of the history of his development we learned that W.A.L.T.E.R stands for Wheeled Autonomous Learning Terrain Exploring Rover.

 

Bill Osborne brought in a MKIII robot to discuss possible methods to troubleshoot and fix the issue he and his son ran into while building and testing the robot.

 

Andrew Alter showed off his version of Johnny 5 (from the movie Short Circuit). A tracked robot with a humanoid torso, arms and working grippers for hands, it was a great exam of a Pico ITX powered robot. Sadly recent issues prevented him from fully demonstrating the robot.

 

Robert Sheer showed off his Survey SRV-1 robot. This robot will play the role of stranded rover in an upcoming IEEE RAS competition here in Portland.

 

Other members showed off projects in various stages of development including several Lego Mindstorms robots as well as some inexpensive XBee application boards available from Digi-Key.