Greg has been working on a new Object Grabber robot.  The new design uses a lead screw to move its gripper (yet to be installed) up and down.  The sensors will also move with the gripper.  By knowing how far the sensors have moved up after looking over there top, the type of object can be identified.

Ed brought his Object Grabber robot to show some new folks at the meeting that haven't had a chance to see it.  It also uses a moving vertical slide system to measure the objects height to determine what is point value is.

Here's is a novel crank and plunger spring system designed make a economical walker leg.

Some more Robo-Magellan project parts.  This is a pan and tilt system for moveing a CMU cam, sonar and IR sensors. These are to aid in the final search and approach to the navigation goal.  The servo motor mounted above the sonar in the left photo is to spin the optical filter disk shown in the right photo.  When mounted in the enclosure, the filters will adjust for the variable outdoor lighting.

Dennis is now using a AVR controller in his Critter Crunch robot project.  Also featuring high performance surplus batteries and a UDN2998 3 amp motor controller chip.