Friday Night Robotics – Hula Hooping Motion?

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, August 24th, 2009

Building on last week’s RGB LEDs, it was time to add some motions to MANOI that would suit the carnival-ish theme.

A significant amount of time was spent on brainstorming ideas on how to make MANOI walk. The key will be the first step, as it has to get the rhythm started. The following steps will maintain the rhythm. Another point to look at would be shoes for MANOI. For walking, MANOI uses these ‘flip flops’ :

For skating, MANOI has roller skates that are made out of lego. These shoes are attached by velcro. It would be interesting to see if I could use some ShapeLock to make new shoes. (Shoes, Omg shoes. Shoes. Let’s buy some shoes!) By using ShapeLock, I may be able to eliminate some of the tilting that the velcro introduces, and thus eliminating another reason why the robot may fall.

In any case, I want to build on MANOI’s hip and leg motions like I did with the arm motions. I started with a simple swaying function, but Boom from the Robotics themed floor suggested an awesome suggestion- tilting the body to make it go forward and backward. In the right sequence, this would make a hula hoop motion!

It was interesting the way we did it. Instead of just telling the hip motors to tilt forward, we also told the shin motors to tilt backward. This maintained the center of balance.

We added onto this with arm motions. When MANOI tilts backwards, the arms go up. We tried keeping the arms up for tilting forward, but it shifted the center of balance too much.

Here are two videos of the motion:

There are more photos on Flickr!

I’m going to blog more about the Robotics themed floor later, as well as the Autonomous Robotics Club! =) I also adopted an iRobot Create recently, and I’m controlling it with an Arduino. It’s fun!

Oh yeah, and MANOI fell about 3 feet from a desk when its battery ran out. It survived just fine, and nothing was broken!

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.
Tags: Arduino, Arduino MEGA, center of balance, hula hoop, MANOI, motors, Sanguino, shapelock, shoes

One Response to “Friday Night Robotics – Hula Hooping Motion?”

1. Phil Winder Says:
   August 25th, 2009 at 3:35 AM

   He does look a bit precarious balancing on the side of the desk!

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