GlussCon

This is a project of Public Invention in support of The Gluss Project, a radical approach to robotics trying to build a general purpose metamorphic machine. Like all Public Invention projects, it is completely open-source and does not seek patents.

The Tetrobot Controller, or TetroCon, explores the possibility of building a hand-manipulable controller which is a puppet or doll–a miniature version of the larger GlussBot/Tetrobot which is to be controlled. By pushing the TetroCon into position with the hands, the GlussBot/TetroBot can be instructed to assume the same configuration (but on a large scale.) The hope is that in this way a work person can easily control the GlussBot/Tetrobot in doing tasks that would otherwise be difficult to specify.

The GlussCon project was originally led by Evan Bartilson and Joshua Hannan, with input from Robert L. Read. The current volunteer is Avinash Baskaran.

Progess So Far

The GlussCon project is still early in its evolution.

The current system functions to remote controller the first tetrahedron of the glussbot robot. The system consists of the 3D printable parts that implement the turret joint while holding linear potentiometers. The pots are multiplexed through a 16 channel MUX chip (only 6 channels in use presently). They are read through a standard Arduino Uno. This has a Sparkfun ESP8266 WIFI shield, which responds to http requests by returning all pot values in JSON. We then read these values and send them to the Tetrobot using a control program that you can find at the Gluss github Repo.

Plans

Our initial plans right now are to:

• Improve the wiring so it is not so awkward, while keeping our multiplexing model.
• Expand to a full 7-Tet controller.
• Improve the 3D printing to make a sturdier solution that we can allow kids to handle without risk of breakage.
• Decrease the lag time by improving the WIFI (and other delays).
• Continue playing to understand how to best use this concept.
• Write a paper aimed at a robotic conference.

How to Contribute

We welcome your participation, in either the GlussCon project, the Gluss project, or one of the other Public Invention projects. To discuss the GlussCon project specifically, email Robert L. Read read.robert@gmail.com Github: robertlread)

You are welcome to email Robert L. Read read.robert@gmail.com to discuss how you can help the Public Invention projects in general.

However, as a public projects, it is even better for you to comment publicly on these projects. You can do this by opening an (“issue”)[https://github.com/PubInv/PubInv/issues] here at GitHub. If you want to add to or improve one of the existing documents, you can do this with a “pull request”.

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All materials produced by PubInv are free and open-source, and licensed either with the GPL (for code) or the Creative Commons Share Alike v 4.0 licenese (for text and designs.)

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