DogBot is my first robotic dog project.

I was inspired by a guy who was building a Robot "watch dog." His dogbot was a little different than mine. I guess his junkbox had different items than mine.

Anyway, his dogbot was great, so it inspired me to build my own. His dogbot had 4-wheel drive, mine two-wheel plus steering.

I'd recommend 4 Wheel Drive so the dog can shift quickly from one direction to another. With steering control, poor dogBot has to backup to do a 180.

Your programming life will be so much easier, your batteries will last longer and you can turn your dog more like a real dog. It can even chase it's own tail.

But, unlike a real dog, a recharger is the only food this dog will need.

This is the dogBot that got me going. You can see in the video, he has put a pretty amazing amount of software development. And it has continued past this video.

But when I saw this watchdog doing it's thing. I was stricken. What I didn't know was that the 4WD version would be best in the end. See how my dogBot has to take the corners wide and back up a distance. He has to have a sensitive IR "nose."

I found a cheap R/C model car. The H-2 Hummer... Hmmm? Fitting end? Remains to be seen...

Here is the shot with the motor controller and the picAxe chip. This is generation number - ??? Who knows? Anyway you can see the elements of the dog.

Biggest problem. Battery Life. Even when it was an R/C car, it demonstrated why I paid so little for it. Undaunted, I moved onward and mostly always, upward.

I'm not sure it ever is. But this was my first robot with some creativity behind it. Not a base, but something creative to do with a base.

In DogBot's first incarnation, it was powered by a picAxe m14 chip. I had a lot of trouble with this thing, but eventually got it to do a few things, but I wanted more, so I kept upgrading...


DogBot operates with several different motivations:

1. Starts in sniff and explore mode where DogBot "drags" itself around by scanning sensors and moving toward the largest object...

2. It will revisit the largest object and move toward it, until the object is too close, DogBot moves back twice as far as before. If a rescan shows no objects are close, DogBot goes into wander mode where it moves toward the open space.

3. DogBot will also wall follow, avoiding major objects, just running around looking at/for things to sniff around.

4. DogBot goes to the light or noise as an overall strategy...

OK, It's what I had in mind for DogBot.

First step.. Get it to "sniff around", next step, get it to find an open spot while avoiding crashing into things... By the time I got a more powerful chip, I was adding features because it was working pretty well.

Now DogBot would look around, find an open spot and take off... While running around though, he would be looking to see if he was going to crash into something...

Getting through the door was a problem because DogBot would find the opening, but when he started through, his over sensitive IR detectors would make him run away from the door opening...

But eventually, DogBot became a free-ranging hound. Someday, I want to take DogBot's head and transplant it to another platform. One that can go for walks with me... I'm not there yet, but DogBot did pass the door test and he does have interesting behaviors that are fun to watch and deal with...