ITA - Intelligent Thermal-Suppression Apparatus

ITA (Intelligent Thermal-Suppression Apparatus, or Intelligens Tűzoltó Apparátus in Hungarian) is a robot-computer system designed to find and put out fires. The robot itself is built from LEGO parts and RC car controller boards with custom electronics. It finds the fire with a photoresistor, so it only works in the dark, and puts it out with a fan, which is much easier than carrying water on a small robot. The photoresistor sits on a turret with a custom-made slip ring, so it can rotate continuously through 360 degrees. Four motors run the whole thing: one drives the back axle, one steers the front, a stepper rotates the turret as it scans for a signal, and the last one spins the fan that blows out the candle. (We used a candle for a safe and reliable fire.)

The brain of the robot is a program written in MSW Logo. Logo can bit-control the LPT port, which keys the channels of the RC car transmitters, and read analog input on the game port, which is how the photoresistor’s value gets into the program. As the robot searches for the fire and navigates towards it, the program draws the journey on the screen, both for visualisation and for backtracking the route afterwards.

I was responsible for the MSW Logo software while István Nickl worked on the hardware, after school, under the mentoring of our teacher Ágota Lang. We entered multiple national high school competitions with ITA, winning first prize of the Metropolis award of the Természet Világa (World of Nature) journal and first prize at the TUDOK conference organised by the Hungarian Research Student Association.