Thursday, November 20th, 2008

Today (Thursday) I got my MANOI working with my Wii nunchuck!

It was super easy since I already had the configuration ready because of my other robot.

Here are some pictures:

The SSC-32 is barely visible anymore!

The big transformer powers the battery to give it 12-13V (constantly). The small transformer is for the Arduino, cause I couldn’t find a 9V battery

MANOI’s Leg

MANOI

MANOI’s back- the battery and Arduino are attached to tape using velcro

The way it works is the Wii nunchuck has an i2dc interface with the Wave Shield, which is on the Arduino. Using the Nunchuck library, you know what button is being pressed and values of the accelerometer.

I already made functions to determine if the nunchuck is tilted home, left/right or up/down. Soooo, I just added the “skating” functions to that, and the condition that the C button has to be pressed. There’s more control this way.

To shoot, it’s just the Z button.

The most surprising part of all of this was when I realized that MANOI “skates” better when I added all the stuff to his back. I guess it adjusted the center of gravity just right!

There’s a video here:

I still have some more stuff to do… like add a few more motions and sound.

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

I added a new Processing thing I made… called Gumball.

It’s not that cool, but great to play with for like 20 seconds. =P

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

This is my Hockey MANOI work in progress robot. It needs a lot of improvement before I actually take it outside (hopefully there won’t be snow by then). It’s using a plastic stick that I found lying around (check out the pics)

So far it’s going okay, I guess. Trying to make a robot balance with many moving parts is difficult though, and really exhausting. There’s lots of things that I’ll need to fix… The program is basically a sequence of movements:

- Forward 6 times
- Shoot 3 times
- Backward 6 times
- Shoot 3 times

The Forward and Backward movements do vary slightly, but they both result in the robot going backwards. I’m trying to think of a way to fix it that will be the best way, like attaching a few heavy rocks to the front of the robot won’t be the best way in this case. Once the robot shoots after going Backward, there’s too much movement and it falls over.

I’ll probably have an if statement in the Shoot movement asking what was the last movement. If it was backwards, the shot will be more slow and less intense so it won’t tip over.

The stick also has to be mounted better… it moves WAY too much =P (those tie wraps serve no purpose)

Despite all of the falling over, it’s fun to be trial’ing and error’ing to see how the robot can balance And it’s working off of an Arduino! I plan to add the Wave Shield, with some hockey sounds/songs that MANOI can play — there will also be a FSR on the stick so the robot will know if it should shoot or not

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

ITS SO FREEZING COLD! I think I’m gonna transform into an ice-cube!! ZGG!

Speaking of cold… You know when you first start to skate, you pretend you’re walking? You hardly go anywhere, but you do go somewhere because of the friction… My robot can now do that! I was playing around with MANOI, gave him some roller-skates (actually: lego wheels), and programmed it in. After a few trials and errors, it works! MANOI now can look like a goofy Canadian newbie skater. SWEET!

I’m trying to find a small hockey stick that I can tape to its hands, but I have a feeling Ill have to make one myself. Carving it will be okay, I’m just worried about how I would make it thin- like half an inch. I’ll probably use one of the sanding power tools to do that (since I don’t want to saw my hand off (or fingers (but then again, they may just fall off because I’m SOFREEZINGCOLD (wow this is a lot of nested brackets (LOL))))).

I hope to play hockey with my ‘bot on Saturday… this will be interesting!

I updated my blarg to Wordpress 2.7 B2, and stylized a new theme! I’m not sure what I should name that lonely RSS elephant over on the right though. Syndie, the syndication elephant? LOL!

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

Yay!! Tonight I worked on my new/old robot… It’s the robot with the chassis of the Stanley robot that I started making at Stanford in the summer. It has a gerabox to power two motors for front wheel drive, plus there’s a servo to “steer” the gearbox.

The cool part is that I use a Wii nunchuck to control the robot Tonight I coded in which way is which- tilted to the left/front/back/right. The tilt to the back doesn’t work very often, so I have to fix it
By this point, you’re probably wondering where the pictures are I can’t upload photos with this version of wordpress (and I’m too sleepy to ftp them right now), but I’ll add them in tomorrow as I’m changing my blog to Wordpress 2.7 tomorrow, with a new theme I really really really like the new theme. It’s going to be awesome!

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

I finally finished off the “Define Dancing” Processing artwork that I started a long time ago! The reason why I didn’t finish it back then was because the colours were messed up. I figured them out, and while playing with the colours, I created another program called Particle Finger Painting
Here’s the Define Dancing one…

You can move your mouse around, and one particles will stay with it. All of the other particles are attracted to it, but some are stronger than the others. Plus, there’s forces between all of the particles too - some of them are negative, which results in “fireworks”-like collisions
Here’s the Particle Finger Painting one-

I really like this one… it’s the same as the Define Dancing one, but the layering and transperency of the ellipses are different.

They both use the traer physics library for the particles.
Try the live ones out- they’re probably laggy since it’s in a browser. In that case, you should download Processing and try them out. It’s a good IDE to have anyway!

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

After using a version of wordpress that’s really old, I updated to the new one.
It’s okay-ish. A lot of bugs. I won’t be surprised if I downgrade haa! Plus, the maps plugin that showed who was currently online doesn’t work anymore… ;(

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

There was a pretty awesome TV special a few nights ago- Rodney’s Robot Revolution. It was on “The Nature of Things”. Here’s the summary they give on their site:

As former head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Professor Brooks is once again going to test his robot-building mettle with what has become the most challenging project of his entire career: to build a robot for the Pentagon capable of playing an ancient Chinese board game of GO against a human opponent. Brooks has only five months to build it from scratch, making his challenge that much more outrageous.

The premise of the show surrounded Rodney Brook’s project for the government- to build a social robot that will play go…. in nine months! (For some reason the CBC website says 5 months, but I clearly heard 9 months, three or four times).
I think he did have some students help- at least he did with the hand part that needed to pick up the pieces. The hand consisted of two fingers, with special force sensing resistors on them. The fingers was pretty good at first- it worked often. Afterwards, they placed a cover on the two fingers with bumps on it so that the piece would remain grasped until placed onto the board. It didn’t work often- it couldn’t pick up the pieces.

The other main parts of the robot was the computer vision. It used two off the shelf logitech cameras as eyes, and it had a few more stationary cameras around to get different views of the board. The eyes were mounted on a metal part that served as a face, which could move. At one point, the robot almost fell off the table because the movements were too quick, and not fluid.

The only part that seemed a little wonky was when they mentioned that robotics is a competitive industry. The jist of the message was that other places like Google, Sony, and Honda are competing with MIT’s robotics. I kind of laughed at that… as MIT is a university, not a company. They weren’t just comparing an apple with an orange, they were comparing an apple with a pineapple. Either way, Sony’s Aibo robot is a distant past, and Asimo has sort of been around for a long time- just evolving and improving! As for Google… errrrr. I thought we were talking about physical robots here? Lol! I think what they meant to portray was that there are other places that are R&D’ing robotics.

The part that I found quite interesting was that even though each of the “sections” of the robot worked okay- like the hand, the computer vision, the algorithms, they weren’t combined to work with each other very well. What I mean by that is… there was too much focus on creating the basics perfectly, instead of just building a simple model first, and improving on it with milestones. If it would have been done this way, there would have been something to demonstrate at the end that would work. It’s better to have something that works, even though it doesn’t meet the requirements, than something that meets the requirements but doesn’t work.

First start off with giving the robot the piece, and start off with all the cameras stationary. The robot can still be sociable even if the cameras aren’t in the eyes (for some reason, this seems to be a common misjudgment). Once that stage is working, make a hand that will have to move the piece. Then make it pick up the piece. After that works, then go on to moving the cameras, and finish up by adding a sociable touch.

It’s almost like the difference between the old macbookpros and the new ones. The old ones were created by putting pieces together, the new ones are created by taking material away. My suggested method is like taking all the possible difficulties away, one by one. If you only put pieces together, you’ll miss out on many opportunities to improve and optimize the robot. Additionally, there were no backup plans. If the robot didn’t have a pebble, it wouldn’t go back to pick another one up. It happens all the time in games between humans… the pieces are small and glossy, seriously!

9 months (or even 5 months) is a lot of time- especially when you have all the resources, and people that are eager to help out.

If I would have built the robot, I would have used an octopus-like suction cup to pick up one of the pieces. The location of the cameras would have been different… and the base would be bigger so it wouldn’t tip over. Plus, my method would have been different, as discussed above.

There’s another neat TV show soon, Five Years on Mars! National Geographic channel, Sunday Nov 2!
Don’t forget about Daily Planet too… my fav TV show that’s on at 7pm each weekday (Discovery Channel)

Friday, October 31st, 2008

I did make something for Hallowe’en… it isn’t much, but it’s just LEDs in a pumpkin in the shape of the star. The most time consuming part was cutting the wires and soldering them… plus, I had to solder a 1K Ohm resistor to each of the positive leads too. Then, I had to shrink wrap it so it wouldn’t short out (like some of the LEDs on BubbleBoy short out because I didn’t shrink wrap them).

It was okay- I wasn’t too pleased with the end result because I didn’t place the points on the star right… and I wanted to carve it out.

I knew from the start though that I want to re-use these LEDs, so I have them all connected into a small black box. Inside of the box is an Arduino - a RBBB. On the outside of the box held together by tape is the 9V battery and a latching switch.

The program basically cycles the LEDs like a marquee in HTML, then blinks them “seizingly” fast (LOL).

I think I may put the LEDs up in my window… it might look cool!

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Instead of having my humanoid completely lift its foot off the ground, it “shuffles”. At least one part of the foot remains in contact with the ground. (It does work when there is no ground underneath the foot, though)

I finished the right leg on Tuesday… I worked on the left one today, and will hopefully finish it off tomorrow so I can spend some time on it on Saturday (and make an insightful blog post for once)

What I’m interested in seeing is what is the maximum speed the robot can go at, without tipping over. Since I’m coding it in slow-motion, I may not account for all of the possible moving parts when the robot is going faster.

Robot motion is pretty cool stuff- it looks easy, but it really isn’t

I’ve also been working on a few other things… More on that (hopefully) tomorrow or Hallowe’en.