Bristle Bots are a simple device that translate the vibrating motion of a pager motor into foreword momentum. As the motor vibrates its kinetic energy first pushes the bot down and then pulls it up. As the bot is pushed down the bristles work like a spring compressing. Then as the vibrations pick up on the brush the bristles decompress if your brush has most of the bristles angled in one direction this pushes the bot in the opposite direction.
I started looking into steering these devices and found that by shifting weight over the device you can change its center of gravity and make it tern. The problem with this steering system is that it requires a fairly wide platform. The bots that use this principle are made with two bristle pontoons with the vibrator and weight in the middle. This seemed to make it hard to scale down the steerable bots. Because most of the fun of these bots is there size i wanted a design that I could scale to any size so I started trying different steering methods. This is the result.
| I wanted my bot to only have one brush so I decided |
to force the bristles into changing angles to steer the bot.
|Sending current into the motor causes one paddle |
to compress the bristles and the other one to pull away
from them. Switching the polarity reverses the paddles.
|I removed the inner bristles from the steering |
section because it increased the sensitivity of the handling.
The Bristle bot steers comparably to other bots I've seen online. I don't have a video camera to show it to you it in action.