Spot is a Real World Interface robot with a one foot diameter three-wheeled base and an enclosure for housing twelve sonar transducers, a power supply, a backplane, an interface board, a sonar controller board and a 68000 microcomputer.
The base has its own microcontroller which accepts translational and rotational position, velocity and acceleration commands and two lead-acid gel cells for power supply.
All its three wheels always face the same direction, so does the enclosure cage to preserve the relative position of sonar transducers. Thus, a sonar transducer assigned to be the frontal one is always facing the direction the robot is facing.
Its twelve sonar sensors are arranged uniformly in a ring at a height of approximately one foot from the ground. The other sensors Spot has are the current and voltage sensors located in the base. The current sensors can be used as simple bump sensors.
WYL