Meeting Minutes, AHRC, June 29, 2002 The meeting was held at Scitrek Officers present: Frank Borowiec - president Richard Bodor - secretary Paul Burrel - co-vice president Dale Heatherington - web master Attendees: 17 Club Business Frank made introductions. Next month our meeting is scheduled to be at automation direct. Atlanta Hobby Day is coming up. We need volunteers to man the booth. We have a 20 x 20 so we need members to bring their robots and be willing to stay and talk about them. We also want a mini-sumo and some robot demonstrations if possible. Please help the club with this event. It is a great way to promote the club and robotics in general. RBNO report - Paul gave quick summary of RBNO. This month there was lathe operation training.. Calvin did a quick Q&A for the Atom board. He was able to repeat some of the information at this meeting. new sponsors: Solution Cubed. They have sent some equipment for us to experiment with. This equipment will be made available to the RBNO group for future projects and to get the club robot going. New attendees: Bruce Snowden Bahey Watson Robomars update: There are now two robot rovers for the exhibit. The exhibit is moving into a more permanent location. There are still changes planned for the next phase of the project Video: no video this month. Show and Tell: * Rooms Chronicle (a bi-monthly newsletter for the hotel industry) did an article on robot vacuum cleaners and we got some good press coverage. The hotel industry is very interested in vacuum bots - since they have to vacuum hundreds of rooms daily per hotel. A possible option that a hotel manager would want to see on a commercial autonomous vacuum cleaner is a hook to hang on the service staff's cart. * John Scott brought in a "larger robot" - cut bot. the base is made from a cutting board. uses pic processor. * Keith Rowell brought in "Robo Sapiens". * Joshua Karg brought in "one" to compete in the mini-sumo * Jared Hussey brought in a model of a star wars robot. * Michael Reese brought in a LEGO "grabber" that uses several motors - it is still a work in progress. * Frank talked about a new walker robot from Parallax. After the networking break, Frank went over the new monthly contest issues. We want a contest that has different levels of performance. We also want to make sure that there is a head to head component to the contest. Finally, we wanted an arena that anyone could do. The committee came up with a 4 x 4 arena (carpet) with a large x in the center. The first level is line following. For the novice, you would touch the four ends of the x (cans would be there) and touch the 4 cans. The advanced level may include obstacles and the cans could be different color so that there is a difficulty level to identify the cans or use ping-pong balls. The attendees discussed the monthly contest. Mini-Sumo Contest Joshua Karg's "One" competes against Dale Heatherington's "Delta Force". Delta Force won. One put up a good fight. One was built using all LEGO parts. The confirmation for the location of our next meeting will be announced on the listbot. All members and interested parties are encouraged to sign up for the listbot. Information is available to sign up via the web page at www.botlanta.org.