Robogames Wrap-Up

Well, it's almost a month since Robogames, but it's been hectic with the end of the semester. The semester is now over though, so it's robot time again.

Issy did terrible in Mech Warfare. He walked like a champ, but had numerous other issues. On Friday afternoon his gun literally exploded inside. Thankfully, I found a Sports Authority around the corner and purchased an extra gun(have I mentioned how much more convienient of a venue San Mateo is over the old place?). Apparently though the Trendnet camera decided that 6V was just too much - it stopped working on Saturday, and Issy was dunn for. He's already been torn down, and retired from Mech Warfare.

He'll be rebuilt over the course of the next month or so, this time with a Fit-PC2, stereo camera head, and a tail. He's going to be running ROS, which ought to be cool. Here's a teaser shot of what he will (hopefully) look like:

On other fronts, I'll be posting some other robot goodies over the coming days. I'm currently working on some finishing software touches for our first "social" robot at Albany, Nelson. I'm also working on a robowaiter entry for next April.

-Fergs

Announcing the RX Bridge

Our friend Andrew Alter, over at Trossen Robotics, has a bit of a servo fetish. He's the kind of guy for whom AX-12+ servos are just not enough -- he has to have RX-28s and RX-64s -- he recently even upgraded a number of his servos to the EX-106+ (you can read more about his robot Giger over here). Anyways, Andrew wanted to control some RX servos with his ArbotiX, and made that fact well known.

It's often said that "you can't eat your cake and have it too" -- but we at Vanadium Labs don't like idioms, because if we use them, our robots will too. What could be more annoying than a robot telling you "There is no free lunch"? So, we decided that the ArbotiX had to now control RX servos -- and that's exactly what our new RX-bridge can do! This little board plugs into your ArbotiX, transforming it into the lowest cost RX controller on the market -- and you can still use your favorite apps like PyPose/NUKE and the familiar Arduino IDE.

-Fergs

P.S. You can see it all in action on Andrew's RX-64 based quadruped -- powered by NUKE:

Vacuum Former Finished

I've been working on building a vacuum former, on and off, since about November. Prior to today, it was still just a pile of parts -- it's now operational.

The former is build out of Home Depot aluminum, a cookie sheet with holes drilled in it, a portable grill/crockpot thingy, and massive shop vac.

It's pretty much a monstrosity. I tried to keep it small, by reducing the height of the lower box, but then ended up finding out I didn't have enough space to get the vacuum tube to turn... I then found these great adjustable legs, from a commercial range, they brought up the height a bunch, and made it easy to plug the tube in. They also add a bunch of weight to the bottom, making it quite a bit more stable.

Unfortunately, you'll have to wait a bit longer to see some of the results, as I didn't get around to snapping shots of Nelson's face plate.

-Fergs

SMALdog gets a new (printed!) head!

I've been slowly getting the Makerbot tuned in, moving to using an SD card made a huge improvement in build quality, and I'm finally comfortable enough with the bot to walk away for a while. So, today I finally printed SMALdog's new head, the largest item I've printed to date, and my first >1h print.

The first one looked great, but about half way through, the pile of ABS got all coiled up, I walked back in to find that the print head and Z-carriage were pulled to the top of the bot, and the ABS was hanging off the side. De-tangle, reset, chop off about 10-20ft of ABS, and tried again. This print took 1h38m.

I then cleaned it up, attached the dual IR sensors, and the AX-12 servo. The 5/8" hole for the sonar sensor needed quite a bit of cleanup, but everything else was nearly perfect. I've now got all the sensors except the IR photodiode mounted, and the head is on SMALdog.

Now, I've got about 4 wks before the fire fighting competition. Hopefully that is enough time to tune his walking gait, load the map following code in, and get everything else working....

-Fergs

What's New in the Lab

It's been a busy month, and the lack of updates here is a testament to that. Over the past month, Vanadium has released two new products, and has another on the way. The MINI RoboController has been on shelves for a few weeks at Trossen, and the ArbotiX Commander should be in stock later this week.

We also purchased a MakerBot, which is now up and running. This little guy will be producing robot parts soon, as I have a number of projects on the backlog that I want to get going.

As for that product on the way: how about controlling some RX-64 servos with your ArbotiX? You'll be able to do just that with our new RX-Bridge, a little add-on board for the ArbotiX that converts it from an AX-12 controller, to an RX-series controller (and EX-106's too).

Lastly, we've been hard at working testing, and the V1.1 release of PyPose/NUKE is just around the corner. Should be out very shortly, with a number of improvements and bug-fixes. Unfortunately, mammal-style IK will be held over until v1.2.

-Fergs

New Products Coming

There are a few products we've been alluding to over the past few months, and they are about to be released.

The first is the MINI robocontroller. It's a smaller version of the ArbotiX based on the ATmega168 -- so it's completely Arduino compatible. Just like the ArbotiX it has a dual motor driver, XBEE socket, low dropout regulator, and 3-pin headers for I/O. The MINI also a block of 4 I/O ports that can be easily configured to control servos. The only thing it's missing from it's big brother is that it can't control AX-12s, and it has fewer I/O. This is the perfect board for your first rover! The MINI has had serious testing, an earlier revision was used as the scoring transponder for Mech Warfare 2009, and the new MINI's will be the scoring transponder for MW2010 and beyond. The MINI is also been the board used in my Introduction to Embedded Computing and Robotics workshop. MINIs will retail for $60, and should be available from Trossen Robotics later this week.

A completely different product is the ArbotiX Commander -- it's an Arduino+XBEE based handheld wireless controller. If you've been using NUKE, you've probably heard of our Commander library and protocol. Being open source, you can hack the Commander to do whatever -- there's a row of female headers along the side of the chip, and a whole slew of extra prototyping area at the top edge. It'll be a bit pricey compared to off-the-shelf controllers like the PS2, but I think the open-source and integrated XBEE make this the perfect controller for advanced roboticists. The Commander will be available later this month!

-Fergs

Get Your IK On

The Nearly Universal Kinematics Engine (NUKE) is finally out in a first beta. Right now our templates only support 3DOF Lizard-legged 4 and 6 leg robots, however 3DOF Mammal-style leg support isn't far off, and low DOF Biped support is in the works. This is the same system that powered Issy, Roz, and Jeff to take the top 3 spots at CNRG's Walker Challenge. It takes about 20-30 minutes to setup your bot once you get the hang of what's going on.



NUKE is written in Python, and it exports a C/C++ Arduino project that runs on the ArbotiX. NUKE can be downloaded from our Google code site: http://code.google.com/p/arbotix/downloads/list. Documentation is also on that site.

We also have a new google group for support (it's very new, hence the low traffic) http://groups.google.com/group/robocontroller

-Fergs