Question: Have you ever engineered a robot? What did it do?

Ted Burke answered on 3 Mar 2019: last edited 3 Mar 2019 6:13 pm

Yes! I’ve literally built hundreds of robots because I teach robotics to university students and also run robot-building workshops with the public. Most of the robots I’ve designed and built are small “autonomous” robot vehicles. By “small”, I mean about the size of a toy car. “Autonomous” means that the robots aren’t controlled by remote control. Instead, we write computer programs that run on the robots and let them control themselves. They have sensors to let them detect their surroundings and decide which way to drive. The sort of things I typically program the robots to do is to find objects, avoid colliding with things, or follow lines or markings on the ground.

Some of my favourite robots that I’ve designed are actually very simple, but what’s special about them is that they cost very little to build (around €10). The cheaper I can make the robots, the more people I can afford to teach how to build them! Even though these low cost robots are simple, you can program them to do all sorts of things and they’re a great way to learn the basics.