FARSCOPE Tortoises

The 2015 cohort of FARSCOPE CDT designed and built robots for outreach use. We worked together with teachers at the Abbeywood community school to design Raspberry Pi based robots to be used in introductory courses on programming and robotics. The inspiration for the robots comes from William Grey Walter’s tortoises that are one of the first robots to display intelligent behaviours. The robots we designed are programmed in python. We developed a set of commands to interact with the motors, LEDs, switches and sensors. The sensors can be moved around on the body of the robot to achieve different behaviours using the same piece of code.

These robots have been used in various outreach activities of the Bristol Robotics Lab including at the We the Curious science museum (now called @Bristol) for the UK Robotics Week 2016.

You can build and program one of your own robots. Get the material here.