Eric Lundquist

Eric Lundquist

Eric and Catherine the Creative II

Eric Lundquist is the past President of the The Robot Group. He served as President (2004, 2003, 2002), Vice President (2000), and as a Board member (2001, 2007). In his tenure with the group, he started the monthly guest speaker program (PastPresentations) and has organized public appearances at SouthBySouthWest2003, SouthBySouthWest2002, SouthBySouthWest2001 and the InsomniacwithDaveAttell television show on Comedy Central.

Thinking he was at "October-fest," Eric made his first appearance at Robofest 7 with his Mobile Robotic Platform. His creation worked quite well and the robot fit right in with the groups other stable of robots. He has since created numerous other robots and enjoys helping others in getting their creations to work.

When not building robots, Eric performs community service such as serving on the Liberal Arts and Science Academy Corporate Advisory Board. LASA is a nationally recognized magnet public high school. The board works closely with the administrators and program director providing advice and resources not normally available to public educators. This unique blending of corporate support and public education has created an incredible program that is something for Austin to be proud of.

In addition to his work on the board, Eric has done educational outreach with various local elementary and middle schools such as: Barton Creek Elementary Gifted and Talented GtClass2003, GtClass2004, AISD CareerDay2003, the LagunaGloria Museums' summer "Robot Art Class", LagunaGloria2004 Robot Building Class, AustinLibrary2004, OdomElementary2005, and ScienceNight at Wells Branch Elementary School.

An Austin resident for over 10 years, Eric works for a leading gaming technology and services company as a senior software engineer. He has over 23 years of experience in software development ranging from: assembly language operating system device drivers, to business applications in COBOL and RPG II, to SQL databases and Object Oriented Java and C++ applications. Building robots is a way for Eric to "get his hands dirty" with real mechanical equipment and leverage his software experience at the same time.

Eric is Married with Children with 4 children ranging in ages from 22 to 9. He also has 2 dogs and 2 cats. When not going quietly insane, Eric enjoys reading science fiction and listening to heavy metal rock.

• Mobile Robotic Platform My First Robot! Essentially a photovore that exhibited remarkably complex behavior utilizing very simple computational resources.

• SeekerRobot Seeker is my current experimentation platform. It is intended to be autonomous and GPS enabled.

• Austin Robot Technology Eric and several members of the Robot Group worked with this local Austin team to build an entry for the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. In particular, Eric and GlennCurrie worked on building a TiltPanPlatform to hold the stereoscopic cameras and laser scanner.

• ToyTankHacking - Modifying a toy tank for use as a robot.

• WideTrack A large tracked robot.

• RobotBrain - Working with GlennCurrie and JeffHurst to provide device driver and mechanical support to the project. Developing device drivers for the DecTalk Text-To-Speech synthesizer and the BabblingHead animatronic head (developed by BrooksColeman and BillCraig).

• BabblingHead - Developed software to synchronize speech coming from the DecTalk in real-time.

• RobotGlove - Developed Java code to control a Lynxmotion Arm with an Essential Reality P5 VR Glove.

• PvcSkeleton - Building a life size articulated human form. Hopefully it will eventually be fully animated.

• ArmadilloNews - BabblingHead makes his big screen debut!

• GopherGripper - Attaching motors to a Gopher Gripper

• CatherineTheCreative I & II - Robot Created Art! Teaching a Lynxmotion Arm to paint and draw.

• Large PVC Pipe Pneumatic Cylinders - These cylinders were built out of 3 inch pvc pipe for the full scale mock-up of B3. They actually worked!

• ScannerBot - A small tilt and pan self-contained unit designed to act as a very slow scan camera. It incorporated a Basic Stamp I to read the CDS cell and a Mini SSC servo controller to drive the servos; all connected to a small laptop via RS-232.

• RoboVac - A radio controlled shop vac. Originally developed for my wife who has difficulty pushing a conventional vacuum due to physical limitations. Power was tethered because of the large power requirements of the shop vac. Additionally, a PC power supply was used to provide +12V drive motor power (automobile electric window motors) and +5V to the radio receiver and servo that controlled the height of the vacuum head. It worked well except for the body length which made maneuvering in tight spots a little difficult.

• PipeBot - A pvc pipe tethered platform. I built this platform mainly to test out the L298 motor controller I had just purchased. Pipe Bot also sported a motion sensor that lit up a bright LED whenever it detected a person in front of it. Kids enjoyed driving it around the Robot Group warehouse. The fuzzy dice, of course, made it go faster.

• Walker - A large chain driven 6-legged walker. Based upon a scaled up version of Gordon McComb's Robot Builders Bonanza walker project. While it never walked very well, it did show up as a background prop in the movie Spy Kids here(lower left) and here(lower right).

• Face Casting - Several of us attempted to make face casts with the eventual goal of making silicon masks that could be animated. It was kind of eery seeing my death mask looking back at me.

• DecTalk - This amazing piece of 1980's technology was acquired for a short-lived business venture years ago. It is still one of the best Text-To-Speech synthesisers out there. I've ported the old DEC driver code to run under Linux and hope to use it with Glenn Currie's RobotBrain project.

• P5Glove - Essential Reality Virtual Reality Glove. Creating GNU C code to run under Windows that can dump raw data from the glove.

• AnotherFifteenMinutes - Played a MIB (along with GlennCurrie) to guard a time traveling Andy Warhol-a-bot for an Austin Museum of Art performance.

• Trebuchet - OK, not stictly a "robot" project if you are going to be technical about it. So sue me! A lot of fun to build anyway. Another photo here in the locked and loaded position.

• GtClass2003 - Performing community outreach at Barton Creek Elementary School for a second grade gifted and talent class.

• NpSmovie - Props for an independant film.

• RobotSantaOrnament - A lighted Xmas tree ornament designed for the Heritage auction 2007.

link

Contact

You can contact Eric at roboenator at gmail dot com

---

Free counters provided by

Andale