TOGS was conceived on the chilly, 9th day of October at Davidson Library after spending hours, maybe even days, and technically, our whole undergraduate careers, trying to come up with a way to spend the most money out of every other group. We believe we have been successful.

Some of our original ideas for a project included a submarine (hah), a George Foreman type auto cooking grill (probably would have been smart to go with this one!), and even a laser guided missile defense system! - none of these really got off of the drawing boards though. Then - without giving any one person all of the credit, I Shaun Tolnay, came up with the idea of an organizational robot. Our idea has evolved from many fantastic goals, very high level being - the robot would be let loose on a messy room, and the bot would roam the room and recognize different items (be them, dirty socks, or shirts, or toys, etc.) and then organize them in the places they belong. We knew the very basics of what we needed to make this happen:

• Wheels to move the robot.
• Some sort of gripping device or arm to handle items
• Sensors used to recognize items
• A controller to tie all of these together.

We scoured the net and found several items that would work. We decided to go with an STMicroelectronics ARM7 processor due to past projects that used these with success and with Professor Butner's previous experience and knowledge of the ARM architecture. We also decided on some 12-24V DC motors - pretty heavy duty ones that Professor Butner had in his storage that we would be able to use. As for our gripping device - we visited lynxmotion.com and fell in love with the robotic arm kits sold on their website, as with the extensive community forums and support available with their products. We had originally planned to recognize objects based on their color - and we purchased some TCS230 color sensors to do this. We searched the internet for a while and the TCS was the only cheap color sensor that we could find. This chip provided many problems for us, a lot of time wasted, and in the end, we had to abandon the chip. We wandered back to lynxmotion and found a line detector from them and quickly purchased two of these. The new goals of the project are for the robot to follow a given line and perform tasks along the way.