The Little Light House
Our team first partnered with the Little Light House and University of Tulsa (TU) in 2013 to build Rusty, a robot. The goal of the project was to create a robot that would allow children with limited use of their hands to manipulate toys inside of a sandbox to help them develop their cognitive abilities. We started work in June of 2013 and presented Rusty to the Little Light House in March of 2014. Since the end users were children, two of our major concerns were the user interface and safety. The RoboHornets worked in conjunction with TU on the project which gave us access to better facilities and equipment for the project.
Currently, we are working with TU to re-design Rusty so that it will be smaller, lighter, and have interchangeable user interfaces for different children with different abilities.
Rusty was our first project with the Little Light House. the goal of the project was to create a robot that would allow the disabled children to manipulate toys inside of a sandbox to help them build cognitive thinking skills. The project was started in June of 2013 and we presented rusty to the Little Light House in March of 2014. One of the major concern of the project was safety since the mains users would be disabled children. We worked in conjunction with TU on the Rusty which gave us access to better facilities and equipment for the project. We still visit the Little Light House every other month to do repairs on Rusty.
A second project was the “Coat of Many Colors”, which was a coat and hat with colored LEDs that lit up in different light patterns for different kinds of motion. The goal is to help children learn spatial awareness and motor skills. An Arduino Lily-Pad processor and several accelerometers were sewn into each garment.
SeaPerch
SeaPerch is a water-based robotics competition that the RoboHornets began to participate in during the winter of 2013. The program was designed in order to recruit more girls onto the team. This aquatics program successfully inspired students to think outside of the box and to overcome specific and interesting challenges.
Sebastian, the 2013 SeaPerch robot, was designed with a PVC base and foam to keep it afloat. It was controlled using, SeaPerch’s own SeaSwitch Operating Box. Sebastian moved through the water with propellers powered by a 12 VDC Motor. The robot was also employed a 12 V Sealed Lead Acid Battery.
TU Storm
Booker T Robotics has teamed up with TU to create a robotics competition for local middle schools. The competition would focus almost entirely on autonomous programming because each team would receive identical pre-built robots. This competition existed in the past; it was stopped around 2005. The previous site for this competing can be found here.
