Robotics

The Robo Bump Truck is a small RC truck used to investigate learning from sensors and steering from camera images. The logs follow the work from a phone in the kitchen to trail driving and a repeatable indoor track, including what failed and what the tests could actually establish.

Latest: kitchen laps

Read Log #3: My robot lapped my kitchen on its own or watch the film. Camera timing, steering geometry, and measurement limits are part of the story. The article describes the conditions tested then; it is not a statement of the truck's current readiness.

Start here

1. Log #1 — learning what to avoid. Read the kitchen experiment · Watch. Other sensors supply training labels; the resulting model takes camera images.
2. Log #2 — a trail and a difficult corner. Read the field log · Watch the released short, “It drove itself”. The article explains the division between model steering and human throttle control.
3. Log #3 — a kitchen racetrack. Read the indoor log · Watch. A repeatable course helps expose faults in the sensing and steering pipeline.

Robot Eyes: the iPhone sensor app

Robot Eyes: Vision & Pose is available on the App Store. I built it to record camera video, LiDAR depth, motion sensors and ARKit pose for robotics experiments and dataset collection. It also supports a live camera stream to a connected computer.

The published app and our development builds are separate. The App Store listing currently shows version 1.1; newer experimental features are not implied by that release. The app source repository remains private.

Build and troubleshooting references

• Troubleshooting guide: problems encountered and the context behind the fixes.
• Public Robo Bump Truck build guide: a reference for the build and its components. Read its limitations and dated evidence alongside the logs; it is not a turnkey recipe or proof that a new build is commissioned and safe to run.