Jerome Demers Brainless But Brilliant Beetle Bots

Jerome Demers is the designer of the single-motor walking machine featured in Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots. I’ve been a big fan of Jerome’s ingenious designs ever since I discovered the walker, but his sites (and he’s had several) were either in French or site components were frequently broken (or both).

So I was thrilled to discover that he’s started putting his bot projects on Instructables. His first is so cool. It’s a two motor/two switch (SPDT) “Beetle Robot” that has the switches/motors cross-wired so that the switches trigger the opposite motors to reverse while that switch is being depressed, creating a basic obstacle-avoidance behavior, with no chip brain of any kind (analog or digital). This is the simplest type of “real” robot (with a sensor-(processor)-actuator chain) that one can build.

Let’s hope that Jerome puts up more how-tos for building his bots. Instructables is a much bigger and better platform for his wonderful ideas.

[Via Make]

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