A nose for our Mouse Robot...

This Robot's Nose is most important. It is a Mouse Robot after all. The MouseBot robot uses its nose like an invisible IR "whisker" which can see the presence of an object without actually touching it. In this episode, we create an invisible whisker using a picAxe m8 chip dedicated to nothing but allowing our robotic mouse to sniff it's way around a room...

We end up making a smart little nose, one that can sense object from up to five feet away, but turn down its sensitivity to allow it to discriminate objects less than an inch or two away. MouseBot can start out with a big picture view, then turn "down" his sensitivity to discriminate his way out of some fairly interesting spaces...

In this clip, we test the IR detector, then put the Wall Follower Mouse body over the detector to see how the IR setup works out... At first the body bounces the IR from the emitter right back into the detector and the LED lights and stays lit. But, when the detector is located inside the body and the IR generator LED is on the outside, everything works just fine. Results of experiment: The detector stays inside the body, while the IR LED must stick out through a hole in the body and a sleeve around the LED to keep the light output ahead of the robot.

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Science & Technology

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