CNRG Report, And A New Robot

So, Issy didn't fare so well in the Fire Fighting competition, he had a hard time staying off the walls, and in the one run he made it into the room his power connection broke off -- as they say at NASA, we've had an anomaly.

However, Issy did win the walker challenge, with an awesome time of 17sec.


2 other ArbotiX powered walkers took 2nd and 3rd in the walker challenge, so it was an awesome weekend for Vanadium. The bot that took 3rd was only finished minutes before the competition, we used NUKE to put an IK based gait on it less than an hour before game time, in the end, there wasn't enough time left to get the sensors mounted so it did the course with dead reckoning.

Since CNRG, I've been cleaning up NUKE code, and working on the Mammalian 3DOF template. I'm working on a new walker inspired by Little Dog, he's about 2/3 scale:




As for NUKE, a beta release should be out in 2-3 weeks, it'll be Alpha-release available via SVN late next week. We're shooting for PyPose V1.1 with NUKE to be out in early January.

-Fergs

Reaver Demo

I've been working on assembling a Biped for mech warfare for a little while now. I finally attached an ArbotiX to it, and started doing pose and capture:


More pics of Reaver:

Beta Testing and Future Work

While the hardware of the arbotiX has been stable and ready to go for months, we've still been working to expand and refine the software suite. Tonight I'm uploading what will probably be the fnal beta release (Beta3b) of the arbotiX/PyPose suite. This latest release features a now fully functional PyPose, with pose and sequence manipulation, the ability to run sequences live in PyPose, and the ability to export the poses and sequences to the AVR. The full download is available on our google code site: http://arbotix.googlecode.com

I'd like to send out a big thanks to all of our beta testers. They've been hard at work testing the heck out of the arbotiX libraries and PyPose. I spent some time the other day working with Seth and Ben to refine the PyPose interface. One of the major changes we've made is to lock the servo position sliders when a pose is not selected for editing, this has made the interface much more intuitive to new users.

This evening I spent a while working with Jodie to get her board working with an STK500. I've been using an AVRISP in house for a while, but one of the things I've been doing is carrying over my heavily modified boards.txt and programmers.txt files from release to release... Apparently, somewhere along the way many things have changed in what the stock file now is, which caused a great deal of confusion tonight. Needless to say, I'll be revisting my boards.txt and programmers.txt files tomorrow, and updating our wiki with a better walk through of setting up programmers.

Anyone who has tested PyPose will notice we have a menu called Tools, which really only has the Pose Editor and the Sequence Editor. Looking towards the future, I'm working on two major tools that will be in future releases of PyPose later this Fall. The first is NUKE, the Nearly Universal Kinematics Engine. NUKE will allow users to setup and export an Arduino project comprised of a complete IK engine, custom tuned for the quad or hex, and a periodic gait engine. The second tool will be a command line style interface within PyPose that will allow you to query and edit anything connected to the Bioloid bus on your arbotiX.

A final note is that we're actually running ahead of schedule here at Vanadium, on both the hardware production and software testing fronts, so you should see the arbotiX on shelves at Trossen by the end of the month!

-Fergs

ArbotiX Beta 3 Released!

It's finally here! PyPose V0.91 is a complete rewrite of the software, using wxPython as the GUI package. It's world's better than the old release.

One of the great new features is that we finally have a sequence engine.

Features coming later this week (hopefully):

• Live sequence playback
• Drop-down selection of serial ports
• Pose & Capture over a USBDynamixel
• Encoders library

All of these features have been in the works for a bit, just need finishing touches. I'll also have a video shortly walking through the whole process of creating poses and sequences to make a little droid walker.

-Fergs

arbotiX Prototypes

The first full batch of arbotiX prototypes is finally done after a summer of development and testing with the 2 original prototypes (1 of which was used in IssyDunnYet, champion at Mech Warfare 2009).

While prototype boards have gone out to early adopters, we're still working on some of the desktop software. A V1.0 release of PyPose is expected around late September, or the same time that boards should be available from Trossen Robotics.

More information can be found here.

-Fergs