STIQUITO: Advanced Experiments with a Simple and Inexpensive Robot, Robot Kit Included - Softcover

Conrad, James M.; Mills, Jonathan W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0818674083 ISBN 13: 9780818674082

Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Pr, 1997

Synopsis

This revolutionary new book describes how to build an inexpensive, small-legged robot, and includes the robot kit. The book provides information on the design and control of legged robots and a curriculum for education that presents experiments and projects that illustrates what they teach. The experiments lead the reader on a tour of the current state of research in robotics. Stiquito has also been used to teach in primary, secondary, and high school curricula. The robot is intended for use as a research and educational platform to study computational sensors, subsumption architectures, neural gait control, behavior of social insects, and machine vision. The robot may be powered and controlled through a tether or autonomously with and on-board power supply and electronics.

The book begins with an introduction that describes the birth of Stiquito. The chapters that follow describe the building process, its modifications, and its increased load capacity. Other chapters examine designs for simple controllers to enhance the functionality of the robot and to give the robot intelligence and SCORPIO hardware designs for performing independent, intelligent operations. The text also illustrates Stiquito's uses in education by presenting lab exercises, describing the use of nitinol in classroom experiments, and providing a robotics curriculum for undergraduates. It examines further research on the role of logic in a mobile robot's sensors, control, and locomotion; Stiquito's platform for AI; and simulation of a robot guided by vision. The book concludes with a discussion of the future for nitinol-propelled walking robots.

About this title

From the Back Cover

The Stiquito robot ia a small, inexpensive, six-legged robot that is intended for use as a research and educational tool. This book describes how to assemble and build Stiquito, provides information on the design and control of legged robots, illustrates its research uses, and includes the robot kit. The experiments in the text lead you on a tour of the current state of robotics research. The hobbyist with some digital electronics background will also find this book challenging.

Stiquito: Advanced Experiments with a simple and Inexpensive Robot begins with an introduction that describes the birth of Stiquito. The chapters that follow describe the building process, its modifications, and its increased load capacity. Other chapters examine designs for simple controllers to enhance the functionality of the robot while giving the robot intelligence and hardware designs for performing independent, intelligent operations. In addition, the book examinies further research on the role of logic in a mobile robot's sensors, control, and locomotion; Stiquito's platform for AI; and  simulation of a robot guided by vision. Stiquito concludes with a discussion of the future for nitinol-propelled walking robots.

The Stiquito On-Line Supplement is on the web!

This site, http://computer.org/books, has additional information not found in the book.

Contents:

• Stiquito Introduction and history
• Walking Robots
• Control of Walking Robots
• Using Stiquito for Research
• The Future of Stiquito

About the Author

James M. Conrad received his bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois, Urbana, and his mater's and doctorate degrees in computer engineering from North Carolina State University.
He is currently an engineer at Ericsson, Inc., and an adjunct professor at North Carolina State University. He has serve as an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas and as an instructor at North Carolina State University. He has also worked at IBM in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and Houston, Texas; at Seer Technologies in Cary, North Carolina; at MCI in research Triangle Park, North Carolina; and at BPM Technology in Greenville, South Carolina.
Dr. Conrad is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, Eta Kappa Nu, and IEEE Computer Society. He is also a Senior Member of IEEE. He is the author of numerous articles in the areas of robotics, parallel processing, artificial intelligence, and engineering education.

Jonathan W. Mills received his doctorate in 1988 from Arizona State University. He is currently an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Indiana University and director of Indiana University's Analog VLSI and Robotics Laboratory, which he founded in 1992. Dr. Mills invented Stiquito in 1992 as a simple and inexpensive walking robot to use in multirobot colonies and with which to study analog VLSI implementations of biological systems. In 1994 he developed the larger Stiquito II robot, which is used in an eight-robot colony in his laboratory. Since 1992 Indiana University has distributed more than 3,000 Stiquito robots, leading to the idea for this book.
Dr. Mills is currently researching biological computation in the brain using tissue-level models of neural structures implemented with analog VLSI field computers. Field computers offer a powerful but simple paradigm for adaptive robotic control. They are small and light enough to be carried by Stiquito, yet still perform sensor fusion and behavioral control.
Dr. Mills has written a series of papers on his analog VLSI and robot designs; he has one patent with several others pending and applied for on his work. He also freely admits that Stiquito is just the start of what he hopes will be a series of improved and functional miniature robots, and he encourages the readers of this book to be inspired and build them.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0818674083
• ISBN 13: 9780818674082
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328