Traxster robot kits

Introduction

Traxster Robot Kit

The Traxster Robot features a very rugged anodized aluminum chassis, driven by two DC gear head motors, running on a set of ABS injection molded tracks. All hardware is either aluminum or stainless steel. The Traxster can easily maneuver through carpet and other types of flooring and traverse over small obstacles. The Traxster's skid-steer drive tracks enables it to spin about it's center axis.

You can start with the basic Traxster kit, and eventually add the following components to increase its power:

Serializer (Microsoft .NET and Robotics Studio applications)
IR Panner
CMUcam2/2+ Turret

Serializer (Microsoft .NET and Robotics Studio applications)

The Serializer Robot Controller provides a ready-to-use solution to interface Microsoft .NET applications to common robotic hardware, e.g. the Traxster Robot Kit. With the Serializer, you can interface the DC motors, servos, analog sensors, I2C devices, single and quadrature encoders, switches/relays, and other devices to the Microsoft .NET framework.

The Serializer can be controlled by any device with a serial port. This could be a Personal Computer, a PDA, a PC104 board, a Single Board Computer, or a microcontroller. With the use of the Microsof .NET framework and various Bluetooth devices, it's also possible to control the serializer using your cell phone to drive the Traxster Robot!

IR Panner Kits

This kit includes the IR Panner, a pan servo, three Sharp IR Sensors, and three Sharp IR cables. It provides a scanning range of 270+ degrees. The angle between each sensor is 45 degrees.

The infrared sensor takes a continuous distance reading and reports the distance as an analog voltage with a distance range of 4cm (1.5") to 80cm (31.5") depending on the specific model selected.

CMUcam2/2+ Turret

The CMUcam2+ consists of a SX52 microcontroller interfaced with a 0V6620 Omnivision CMOS camera that allows high-level data to be extracted from the camera's streaming video. Its primary function is to track and monitor highly contrasting color regions. It can also detect motion, provide color statistics, and transmit image information to a computer for additional processing.

The CMUcam2+ has the following functionality:

Track user-defined colors at up to 50 Frames Per Second (FPS)
Track motion using frame differencing at 26 FPS
Find the centroid of any tracked data
Gather mean color and variance information
Gather a 28 bin histogram of each color channel
Manipulate horizontally pixel-differenced images
Transfer a real-time binary bitmap of the tracked pixels in an image
Arbitrary image windowing
Adjust the camera's image properties
Dump a raw image (single or multiple channels)
Up to 160 X 255 resolution
Supports multiple baud rates
Control 5 servo outputs
Automatically use servos to do two axis color tracking

With the CMUcam2+ Turret, it allows the CMUcam2+ to pan left to right, and up and down for a greater range of visibility. The CMUcam2+ Turret can tilt 45+ degrees up and 45+ degrees down. The pan ability of the turret is only limited to the sweep of your servo, which is typically around 180 degrees. It also features a "Sensor Shell", which sits in front of the CMUcam2+ to allow you to mount popular robotic sensors to improve your robots (such as Traxster Robot) vision capabilities.

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