Hacked Hexbug spiders using arduino, xBee, and ultrasonic rangers. Our efforts created an expandable, customizable and flexible mobile sensing platform with the capability to be integrated into a cooperative mesh-network. Basic relative location data, using radio signal strength, was gathered from the Xbee module on the mobile spider to get rough idea of location without the need for a camera or GPS. By expanding the network of spider robots the resolution of the network could increase. Each spider could be given unique commands and talk to each other. New features, such as temperature sensors or cameras, or improved algorithms for movement could be rapidly integrated into the existing arduino micro-controller on the individual spiderbots to increase the potential of the mobile platform. The robots are linked into Max MSP for interfacing with a computer, so complex computations could occur off-platform, which allows each individual spider to have cheaper hardware overall. Max MSP also served as a way to issue commands to the spider robot for users.

This was a fun project that Jane Apple and I put together for NMD 102. We took a little $15 hexbug spider and modified it to have an arduino UNO brain, and gave it wireless capabilities using Xbee modules. Then we hooked up an ultrasonic ranging sensor so that it could do collision avoidance. It was a pretty rough hack (especially in the looks department), but the possible features that it opened up plus the ability to hook multiple spiders up in a network could lead to some interesting interactions.

The original plan was to have a rough form of “echo location” using radio waves by using 2 spiders and 3 Xbees (1 for each spider and a control module hooked to a laptop) but the day before the project was due the blue spider was damaged. We end up reworking the entire premise, which ended up more bitter and humorous then the original intent of the project.