STIQUITO for Beginners: An Introduction to Robotics, Robot Kit Included: An Introduction to Robotics II (Systems) - Softcover

Conrad, James M.; Mills, Jonathan W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0818675144 ISBN 13: 9780818675140

Publisher: Wiley–Blackwell, 1999

Synopsis

This second book on Stiquito presents you with a unique opportunityto learn about the field of engineering, electronics, and roboticsin an original way. This book provides you with the skills andequipment to build a very small robot, instructions on how to buildelectronic controls for your robot, and a robot kit.

The Stiquito robot is a small, inexpensive, six–legged robot thatis unique not only by its cost but because its applications arelimitless. This book is written at a level for High School andCollege students. It provides an engineering, electronics, androbotics curriculum, and presents experiments and projects thatillustrate what they teach. It also illustrates Stiquito′s uses ineducation by presenting lab exercises and describes the use ofnitinol in classroom experiments. Stiquito has already successfullybeen used to teach in primary, secondary, high school, and collegecurricula. An accompanying teacher′s manual that includes problemsolutions, descriptions for teaching each chapter, sciencebenchmarks, national standards, and additional experimentsassociated with each chapter will be available.

The Stiquito Online Supplement is on the web! This extra website,http://computer.org/books, has additional information not found inthe book.

About this title

From the Author

The book includes a robot kit!
The book consists of three main parts: building instructions for Stiquito and other legged robots; examples of PC and microcontoller circuits to make the robot move; and examples of applications of Stiquito.

Please note that to build Stiquito you need hobby building skills (cutting fine metal wire, tying knots in the wire, crimping wire in aluminum tubing). Also note that Stiquito has been built by at least 3000 people between the ages of 10 to, well, near 99!

About the Author

James M. Conrad received his bachelor′s degree in computer sciencefrom the University of Illinois, Urbana, and his mater′s anddoctorate degrees in computer engineering from North Carolina StateUniversity.
He is currently an engineer at Ericsson, Inc., and an adjunctprofessor at North Carolina State University. He has serve as anassistant professor at the University of Arkansas and as aninstructor at North Carolina State University. He has also workedat IBM in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and Houston,Texas; at Seer Technologies in Cary, North Carolina; at MCI inresearch Triangle Park, North Carolina; and at BPM Technology inGreenville, South Carolina.
Dr. Conrad is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery,Eta Kappa Nu, and IEEE Computer Society. He is also a Senior Memberof IEEE. He is the author of numerous articles in the areas ofrobotics, parallel processing, artificial intelligence, andengineering education.

Jonathan W. Mills received his doctorate in 1988 from Arizona StateUniversity. He is currently an associate professor in the ComputerScience Department at Indiana University and director of IndianaUniversity′s Analog VLSI and Robotics Laboratory, which he foundedin 1992. Dr. Mills invented Stiquito in 1992 as a simple andinexpensive walking robot to use in multirobot colonies and withwhich to study analog VLSI implementations of biological systems.In 1994 he developed the larger Stiquito II robot, which is used inan eight–robot colony in his laboratory. Since 1992 IndianaUniversity has distributed more than 3,000 Stiquito robots, leadingto the idea for this book.
Dr. Mills is currently researching biological computation in thebrain using tissue–level models of neural structures implementedwith analog VLSI field computers. Field computers offer a powerfulbut simple paradigm for adaptive robotic control. They are smalland light enough to be carried by Stiquito, yet still performsensor fusion and behavioral control.
Dr. Mills has written a series of papers on his analog VLSI androbot designs; he has one patent with several others pending andapplied for on his work. He also freely admits that Stiquito isjust the start of what he hopes will be a series of improved andfunctional miniature robots, and he encourages the readers of thisbook to be inspired and build them.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley–Blackwell
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0818675144
• ISBN 13: 9780818675140
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 192