Minutes from the March 2007

Connecticut Robotics Society Meeting:

Total attendance: 20+

The meeting commenced with a viewing of several short videos from Engineering TV - an Internet website containing several movies ranging in topics from the DARPA Challenge to human/robotic interaction.

Following this, Nathanial brought in his new Trinity Fire Fighting robot. He discussed what he used to construct the ‘bot (including a Basic X microprocessor) and that his main goal this year was speed. He then set the robot on the floor for a wall following and candle searching demo. Very impressive!

John G. came up next reminding everyone about the new CRS Yahoo group: CTBots which is free to join. He also discussed the possibility of setting up a poster for the CRS at this year’s Trinity Fire Fighting Contest.

Jake was next discussing the independent project of one of his students: Nathanial R.: a checkers playing robot. Following a brief introduction, Jake showed everyone a video of this impressive creation in action.

Duncan was up next with a very impressive Lego and OOPic creation. Great work!

This was then followed by Scott with a demonstration of his senior project at RIT. Having been required to create and develop something new for this project, Scott and his team came up with the idea to create an alert system for USB Flash drives so that they aren’t forgotten at a public terminal. This is achieved by having the device sound an alarm whenever the user strays to far away from the computer. Scott explained how it all worked and gave a demo of the prototype in action. Great work Scott!

Jake came up next with a discussion of RobotBasic – a free robotics simulator program.

Paul C. followed this with a very interesting talk on State Machines. In his discussion he explained to the group how they worked and what the advantages to using them were. Thanks Paul!

The group then split up to general discussion, “Down and Back” contest practice, and mini-sumo between Jim and Walter.

The meeting adjourned around 4:30pm