Toddler® Troupe: Doing the Hokey Pokey "Robot-Style"
Appeared in the 2004 Product Catalog.
Authored by Ken Gracey with programming by Kris Magri
Wireless communication for robotics is becoming a fundamental aspect for dispersed task-oriented projects in space, remote surveillance, firefighting, hospital and elderly care. While we don’t believe it is practical to send a Toddler® robot or Boe-Bot® robot out to administer medicine, our experimentation with networked Toddlers proved to gather quite a bit of interest on discussion groups and at different Parallax presentations like the one below at RoboMaxx in Grant's Pass, Oregon.
Our project was quite simplistic, operating in an open-loop command mode. We used eight Toddler robots, seven painted black and one painted blue. The blue Toddler robot was the lead robot, but basically ran the same code as the rest of the Toddler robots. All Toddler robots received code sent by a with with a pushbutton-equipped BS2/Board of Education® carrier board and radio transmitter.
Based on the character sent from the transmitter, the blue Toddler robot would synchronize all of the Toddler robots to perform the different commands. This loop of example code was intermittently polled by each black Toddler robot:
Main:
DO
command = “ “
GOSUB Wait_For_Command
IF (command <> “ “ ) THEN
GOSUB Blink_LEDs_One_Sec
SELECT command
CASE “I”: ‘ Initialize
GOSUB RESETCC
CASE “F”: ‘ Forward
GOSUB FORWARD_MARCH
CASE “D”: ‘ Dance
GOSUB HOKEY_POKEY
CASE “S”: ‘ Seek Light
GOSUB FOLLOW_LIGHT
CASE “C”: ‘ Light Compass
GOSUB LIGHT_COMPASS
CASE “H”: ‘ Halt
GOSUB Halt
ENDSELECT
ENDIF
LOOP
The result of this fascinating experiment was a collection of complex robots that danced, marched and followed light in unison. At the 2003 RoboMaxx event in Grant’s Pass, Oregon, the Dancing Toddler robots performed twice to a large cheering crowd between the mini sumo events.
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