Have you ever just said “I don’t have enough hands to carry all this stuff”? Instead of walking back and forth carrying things, Butler Bot can hold and transport items for you.
Butler Bot is a device that gives an extra hand when moving around. From carrying a bottle to a bag across the room or through the car park, Butler Bot can help.
The inspiration behind our project was to reduce risk in the armed forced (a larger version of the robot would be required). Having this device in a situation could be life saving whether it be hiding behind the robot, or the robot carrying your gear so you can tend to another person, or even carry an injured person. This robot would also be useful in a household (smaller version required) to carry food, drink, clothing and other household materials.
After conducting some research, we found a company named ‘Roboteam‘ based in the US that makes a large all terrain vehicle that can carry large amounts of cargo called the ‘PROBOT‘. The company also has other smaller and larger robots suck as ‘MTGR‘, ‘IRIS‘, ‘ROCU-7‘, ‘AI-CU‘, and the ‘TIGR‘. The TIGR also has a larger version coming in the near future.
The Butler Bot worked well until we tried to add a dispense system to unload cargo, as the infrared beacon interfered. In the early stages we also wanted to run four independently controlled wheels, this fell through as the EV3 brick and LEGO Mindstorms programmer will not let us run all four motors at the same time. There was a large learning curve when we started using the infrared sensor and beacon as we had never used the sensor or the beacon.
If we had another chance to redesign the robot we would likely build a better wheel base with two motors instead of four, having the four motors would be ideal but with restrictions on the EV3 it was not a possibility. If we had the materials we would also make it bigger.
Jackson Foggo – programmer/designer/presenter
Steve Reynolds – designer/builder/destroyer
