The idea for these little guys comes directly from the work being done at MIT. In general, the work that Rodney Brooks has done, specifically The Ants. This project has been almost the answer to prayer around here, building a solitary robot that works is definately an achievement, but having a colony of agents doing your (or their own) bidding and communicating within each other is what we consider the ultimate achievement.
The rodaga's aren't quite as small as the ants but we've strived to keep them as small as possible. Like many projects these days, inspiration for the body and size came quite unexpectantly. I was shopping in a novelty store and came across a dinky little car vacuum cleaner that looked kinda cool.
We had in the past purchased a toy from good ol' Radio Shack that had what turned out to be the perfect size treads for the vacuum chassis we now had. We're only planning on using the front section's treads and the extra climbing wheel...
Marrying these two won't be easy, but my personal feeling is that we should spend the time enclosing our little bots in a shell (exoskeleton) rather than leaving "..it all hanging out" for the world to see :} The Radio Shack toy's drive train is simply go forward, so we can't use those axles or anything, we'll have to improvise. The plan is to use two Futaba S-133 micro servos as a differential drive, we just happened to have a few lying around :) I'm confident they'll have the torque to drive these guys around relatively flat surfaces, and should be able to climb small obstacles if needed.
Our original idea was to use the body from this small toy we found in the local Toys R Us. We may one day be able to build them small enough to fit in this shell, but for now we'll use the combination shown above...
The plan is to use Marvin Green's BOTBoard for the brains in these guys, they've been ordered, and should arrive shortly. We intend to program them in 'C' if possible, we're on the hunt for a good compiler that will work with the BOTBoard. If not available, we'll start off with the good old reliable 'SBASIC'.