Our robots

Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems (CRNS)

Robots for teaching purposes

 The CRNS uses a variety of robot for its teaching: 
  • 25 x Plymouth Nanobot – FPGA, Arduino, Pi controllable 2-wheeled robot for 1st/2nd years.
  • 12 x Plymouth Humanoids – 18 DF humanoids with Odroid 64-bit quad core processors, running own robot framework under Linux Ubuntu with OpenCV vision, and Atmel processor R/T gait controller, IMUs, mono camera, wifi link. Used for gait kinematics, and computer vision for 2nd /3rd year and MSc.
  • 21 x Plymouth OWL robot – stereo vision using Raspberry Pi computer board with twin OV5647 cameras. Links to host for vision analysis and servo control. Used for servo control, stereo vergence, disparity and saccadic eye modelling for 3rd year and MSc Robotics.
  • 10 x NAO robots for HRI for 3rd year.
  • 1 x Gummi ARM for soft robotics MEng final year and MSc Robotics.
  • 20 x complete Dynamixel 5-axis robot arms used for robotics teaching.
  • 1 x Baxter bi-manual robot with ROS interface (available for final year projects).
  • 3 x Mitsubishi industrial Pick&Place arms for 2nd year and MSc Robotics.
  • 15x pole-balancing robots for 2nd/3rd year for control theory.
  • 20 buggies for ‘Robot Software Engineering’ with Arduino Uno, Pi 3 and Android phones to support distributed development with ROS.
  • 40 e-pucks.
  • Six rapid prototyping printers supporting PLA, ABS, Nylon, conductive elastomer and other materials.
  • Solidworks CAD design and Modelling software available on over 30 workstations for robotics and electronics students.

In-house built robots

Various robot platforms have been designed in-house. The latest soft-robotics platform GummiArm has been designed by Martin Stoelen to do experiments in agriculture robotics. And the Plymouth OWL robot, used for teaching active vision for scene analysis and cognition. Plymouth Humanoid robots for robot football.
The SlothBot is a slow-moving wall-like robot built for an arts project. 
The Autonomous Wheelchair was developed for a 1997 exhibition by Donald Rodney. 
ButlerBot is a robot designed to serve drinks during highly dynamic and unpredictable cocktail parties. The CNRS has a strong presence in the Hurosot humanoid robot football competition. 
The Robot Bunny is a platform developed for teaching and bipedal robotics research.