Roaming Around in an ROV

July 13, 2001 - One of the most useful, and yet most fun advancements of science has got to be in the area of robotics. That ability we have to get machines to do what we either can’t do, or can’t do fast enough. The most popular robotics program by far is the Mars Pathfinder Expedition. The entire world watched as we actually put up a little robot on the surface of the planet Mars, our nearest planetary neighbor. It was almost as if we were all there, thanks to that little machine. After the Pathfinder Expedition, many robotics enthusiasts jumped on the bandwagon with their own version of home ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicles) programs.

Michael was one of the first on the bandwagon. He took an old Radio Shack remote control truck he bought for twenty dollars and decided to have some fun with it. "I quickly opened it up and located the twelve volt bus" which he used to power the XCam2 camera that he was about to install into the robotic truck. And fortunately the camera just fit in the cab of the truck, without Michael having to make any modifications.

"With the power now connected," Michael continued, "I simply placed the TX board on top the truck’s transceiver compartment." And it fit just right! Michael’s on a roll. From there, he took a 2.5 GHz microwave antenna and fit it above the steering servo.

Then there was the matter of feeding the wires from the truck to the body so that he could hook up the camera. "But a problem quickly followed" he said as he tried to feed the wires. Isn’t that just the way it usually goes? "The truck’s battery compartment carries eight double-A batteries, even though it puts out twelve volts, but with barely an amp of current to drive servo, rear motor, camera, RC transceiver and video TX," which is tech talk for saying "I’ve given her all she’s got Captain, but she just won’t do it!" So Michael was going to have to be creative and come up with another source for power. Well, there was the obvious... add some batteries. Of course batteries take up extra room. But wait, this is a truck. The truck has a bed. Now there’s an idea. Put the batteries in the truck bed. "So I went to an electronics surplus store, grabbed me some small twelve-volt lead acid sealed batteries, and put them in the back." And now it works great.

Michael says he’s "done a few trips around the upstairs while sitting back on the couch downstairs and watching the whole thing on a good ol’ twenty-six inch TV. He even says he’s got a little video of a truck/cat chase... or was it a cat/truck chase? Well whatever it is, X10 is making the world of robotics a whole lot more fun. For humans that is. The jury’s still out on cats.

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