Ant as a model
Robot kit for young makers
The robot ant »variAnt« walks and behaves almost like its living model. With a sensor system, it autonomously explores its environment and perceives obstacles or markings. The programmable kit from Variobot is suitable for young and young-at-heart researchers.
Similar to most living creatures, »variAnt« adapts to the ambient conditions via relative brightness perception. This is made possible by a patented sensor network. The light sensors of the autonomous robot ant are attached to the body, legs, antennae and jaw claws and can be aligned according to requirements.
The robotic ant uses these to detect objects, lines, light sources or shadows in its environment, and tracks or avoids them in a targeted manner. The walking mechanism developed and patented by Variobot is intended to resemble the natural locomotion of an ant. This is possible with 24 acrylic components.
The instructions describe the mechanical and electronic construction of the robot ant step by step and with numerous illustrations. Soldering is not required. It also explains how to write the first simple Arduino programs using ready-made code modules and how to expand them step by step. Motivated by this, strategic and interactive tasks can also be implemented with increasing understanding, right up to the first experiments with artificial intelligence (AI).
The hardware
The »brain« of the ant robot consists of an Arduino-compatible nano board with a 32 MHz processor. The compact control unit offers connections for 2 motors, 2 reed switches for step counting, 8 analog sensor inputs, 2 programmable buttons, 8 freely usable digital I/Os and 15 plug-in and switchable status LEDs. The LEDs can indicate the status of the sensors, the motors and the reed switches. A small plug-in board in the ant head allows flexible combination and expansion of the environmental sensors. The included lithium-ion battery lets variAnt run for about 3 hours and is rechargeable via USB cable.
Variobot offers the new variAnt robot kit in its webshop. It contains 345 components with lithium-ion battery, 2 hex keys, sandpaper and lubricant, instructions and program library as download and is available for €199.90.
