To read in the october issue of Scientific American, an article about Ballbot a robot using a new mode of locomotion. Introduced in October 2005 at the International Symposium for Robotics Research in San Francisco by the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As the name says, the robot is balancing on a ball or as the creators call it A Dynamically Stable Single-Wheeled Mobile Robot with Inverse Mouse-Ball Drive.

Videos of this robot are also available Video 1 Point-to-point motion and Video 2 Response to a disturbance

I apologize for any mistakes I could have made posting this topic.

There is a new, better quality video, of my stair climbing robot available now on my YouTube Space

I also changed the name of the robot from Nemesis to Escarob ; )

THE VIDEOS OF, ESCAROB, MY STAIR CLIMBING ROBOT ARE NOW AVAILABLE.

Now that the 2006 fall semester has started and everybody got back to work, I finally received the videos we took of my stair climbing robot. The robot was not R/C when we shot those videos, that is why you can see a RJ45 cable between the joystick and the robot.

You can see the VIDEOS HERE.

The first one shows my robot on plaine surface, the second one shows it's stair climbing capability and the third one shows the robot climbing on PCs

I am now adding a pan/tilt IR camera to the robot with 2.4Ghz transmitter and receiver, a GPS, inclinometers and proximity sensors. I already started working on the second generation which should be a bit smaller and half the weight of the first one (140lbs).

One of the next steps will be to make it semi- autonomous and then Fully autonomous but that will have to wait considering the amount of hours I'll have to spend on programming (assembly) because of security issues due to the weight and speed (6kph) of the robot.

François Brodeur

Comments or suggestions would be appreciated. fbrodeur@gmail.com