krishnamanaswid / tortoises

Alternative repository for the Tortoise robots designed by the FARSCOPE 2015 group from Bristol.

Tortoises

This is an alternative repository for the Tortoise robots designed by the FARSCOPE 2015 group from Bristol. The original repository is private to the Bristol Robotics Lab. I will be maintaining and updating this public repository henceforth.

A few changes to note: The original version had separate brances for python 2 and 3. This repository is going to use python 3 only.

History:

The Tortoise robots were designed for public outreach by the FARSCOPE 2015 students. They were made in 2015-16. We worked together with teachers at the Abbeywood community school to design Raspberry Pi based robots to be used in introductory courses on programming and robotics. The inspiration for theese comes from William Grey Walter's robots, built in Bristol in the late 1940s, that are one of the first robots to display intelligent behaviours.

The robots we designed are programmed in python. The body was designed to be lasercut and take a bit of beating from kids. Most of the sensors and buttons can be moved around. This results in interesting new behaviours without changing the code.

After first being tried out at Abeywood school in Filton, these robots have been used in various outreach activities of the Bristol Robotics Lab including at the We the Curious science museum (now called @Bristol) for the UK Robotics Week 2016.