BezBlog

As part of MIT's 6.141 robotics course , we were challenged in teams to create autonomous robots that could navigate a space while collecting blocks and ultimately deploy those blocks to form some sort of structure (see: background and details ). The approach that my team took for the grand challenge was an ambitious one: create a fleet of diversified but simple robots that cooperate to gather and stack blocks. These “worker” robots are meant to be extremely simple remote-control vehicles that are commanded by a sensory “mothership” robot. The primary motivation was to develop a system that could parallelize tasks and capitalize on the agility of using smaller robots (for example, improved maneuverability in tight spaces). Our original design consisted of three “worker” robots: an agile gatherer that could grasp and carry a block, a dump truck that could carry multiple blocks, and a slow-but-precise stacker robot that could create block towers up to six blocks tall. The worker...

One of the coolest things about MIT is the wide range of opportunities to work on awesome projects outside of class. I'm on the executive board of a fairly new student group called Next Make . Next Make is a collection of motivated engineers in my dorm - Next House - with a mission of furthering Mens et Manus at MIT. We want to practice and teach hands-on engineering skills that build upon our collective past experience in order to learn and build really cool stuff! Over the past semester, and especially culminating at the beginning of February, I helped organize the design and construction of an amazing LED party lighting system for our dorm with Next Make. At the beginning, our goal was exactly that statement: "we want to build a really awesome LED party lighting system for our dorm." This was an admittedly broad goal, so during the semester we refined the idea into a detailed design that could actually be implemented. (On a sidenote, another cool thing about MIT...