Rover, another Wan Yik Lee creation, was a homebrewed robotic base powered by two motorized wheels which were controlled based on differential velocity. A SONAR system was mounted on top of the base.
The base had a dedicated microcontroller to allow it to accept various motion commands through a serial port. Encoders wee mounted on the motors to provide motion feedback.
The SONAR system consisted two parts :
a) a ring of sixteen uniformly-mounted Polaroid SONAR transducers, and 2) a microcontroller with two Polaroid SONAR drivers to accept various sensing commands and to control the operation of the sensing system.
The SONAR ring was adjustable to a height between 30 inches to 38 inches and could be programmed to sense according to various schemes.
Rover had been dressed up as a space-age android, and exhibited as a human transporter in RoboFest 4 (1993) and RoboFest 5 (1994). It served hundreds of human drivers using a Nintendo joystick controller as the interface for motion command.
