Colin O'Flynn
Archive · old wiki · last edited August 2010

Al-Bot / STANN Bot

Archived from the site that ran here before WordPress, and reproduced as written — links and prices and "coming soon"s included. Nothing on this page is maintained.

Also written up on the earlier hand-written version: Al-Bot — different material.

Background

This project was my entry into the local Bay Area Science and Engineering Fair (BASEF). It was designed to be a development platform for artificial intelligence technology. It had a modular board setup where all boards plugged into a backplane, which allowed boards to be swapped around.

As well it had a colour camera in the form of a CMUCam that could be used to perform object tracking.

This did use to be called STANN Robot. The name changed when I was working on it though to Al-bot, thats is AL-bot and not AI-bot. The reason for this is my friends young cousins mis-pronounced AI-bot (for Artificial Intelligence bot) as ‘Al-bot’ in a game, and the name stuck.

A Huge Thanks

This project has really been intersting so far, and I have learned a lot from it. However there have been a few people I would like to thank greatly, they are:

Atmel - Provided me with STK500, STK501, JTAG ICE and some AtMega128 samples. These development tools have been a key part in the design of my robot, and make it possible to do much more in less time! Eivind Sivertsen - Webmaster of AVRFreaks.net Jacob Lunn Lassen - Field Application Engineer for Atmel AVR Products in Norway Tim Kitagawa - Atmel Field Application Engineer in Canada Joe Young - Regional Sales Manager for Atmel in Canada

Honeywell - Provided me with M22S rotation sensor Yan Gaudet - Technical Application Specialist

Results

At BASEF from April 2nd to 5th 2003 I won the following awards:

  • Best in Fair - 2nd Place
  • Intel International Science and Engineering Fair Trip
  • Gold Merit Award
  • Procor Senior
  • PEO (Professional Engineers of Ontario) Hamilton Chapter - First Place
  • Mechanical Construction Association
  • McMaster University Tuition - Engineering or Science
  • IISEF - Yale Science & Engineering
  • Dofasco - Process Automation
  • Bell Computer & Communications - 2nd

At the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Cleveland (May 2003) I won a third place award for the category of engineering and I attended this fair as a member of Team Canada 2003.

Download

The download file includes much C code, VHDL, schematics, and documention. May be useful if you want to see:

  • colour object tracking using CMUCam
  • my own communications protocol called the StannBus using a backplane design
  • motor speed controller
  • FRAM access
  • using SONAR
  • how neural networks work as it includes a large documentation package with introduction on them

You can get these files from the AVRFreaks.net website by searching for STANN in the projects section.

Alternately you can grab the files from a local mirror: STANN_bot.zip 1.8 MB

Photos

Here are two photos that were on by backboard of the display, the show photos of the completed robots as well as parts:

A few interesting parts of the board: The VFD display, some serious power usage!

The processor board. Note the connector is reversed so there is a “fixme” board attached…