Course: Begin Robotics

In this video Richard demonstrates his musical skills and the principles of haptic technology using a virtual drum kit, created by a student at the University of Reading.

Dr Peter Scarfe, researcher and lecturer from the School of Psychology at the University of Reading introduces PhD student, Victoria Oguntosin, demonstrating one of the devices designed and built by …

In this video Andrew Glennerster and Peter Scarfe explain how the Haptic Master, a multi sensory robotic arm, enables the user to explore the texture of different surfaces whilst navigating …

The Grimblebot is a self-balancing robot which utilises ultrasonic sensors to detect if it is falling over and closed loop control to stay upright. To find out more about the …

Whereas our early robots had two wheels for driving it along and a caster wheel at the front for balance, ERIC just has two wheels, which means its circuit board, …

This week we have looked into feedback in more detail – for control and for interaction. We started by showing why, if a robot is to move on different surfaces …

The mobile robots interact with their environment – to move around avoiding obstacles (or other robots), the robot has to sense those obstacles, and steer away. Or if a robot …

The original industrial robots were large devices capable of moving very rapidly where it was important for safety reasons that humans kept out of the way. The robots may have …

The two previous steps have explained why control is needed and how it is achieved, and these have been illustrated in the previous video in Step 3.5. In the video …

If you’re eager to push yourself a little further, you may like to work through this Step. If you do find this a bit too challenging you can always return …

We have seen that feedback control is used by the steersman to ensure his boat stays on course and that it can be used to ensure that our robot moves …

Dave Keating, a former colleague of Richard, designed Hasbro’s interactive R2-D2 Astromech Droid, a robot which responds to voice commands. Watch this clip to find out more.

We have seen that motor speed is affected by friction and by whether the robot is travelling up or down a slope – and thus to maintain constant speed, feedback …

Meet Baxter, one of the newer additions to the University of Reading. Robots have been used in industry for many years. Early ones were employed in the car industry doing …

In this video William Harwin, Professor of interactive and human robotics at the University of Reading, introduces haptic robotics.