Friday Night Robotics!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on 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

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

Shuffling Robot

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on 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.

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

Humanoid Walk

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, October 25th, 2008

This entire week I have been working on MANOI! (and iPhone apps)
I discarded the idea of having a separate TX line- as the SoftwareSerial stuff never worked properly.

Right now I’m in the process of mapping out a way for the humanoid to walk. It’s intensely difficult… So, I’m doing it with pencil and paper… then I’ll code it into the Arduino, and find a protractor to double check all the angles.

(Hey- my plan sounds FANTASTIC in theory! I guess this will mean I will end up doing everything BUT the plan )

I’ll probably make a back-dated blog post on Wednesday as that is when I got the robot to balanced, and it’s a pretty significant milestone

My “jello world” iPhone app is coming along nicely. I like it a lot, hopefully I’ll be putting it up in the App Store in the middle of next week

Posted in: MANOI, Programming, Projects, Robot.

Robot Withstands a KICK!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, December 8th, 2007

Ha! A self balancing robot, pretty neat. Except, I thought the kicks would be super ninja style, except they were just shoves. But even still, not many people are going to super ninja kick their robot. This is what the article says:

If robots are going to work alongside humans, then they will need to stand up to accidental bumps and shoves, not to mention the occasional deliberate kick.

That is why researchers in Japan have developed software that allows a life-size humanoid robot to stay on its feet no matter where on its body it is pushed. Theirs is the first full-size humanoid to show such steadiness – others of similar size inevitably topple over when nudged in the right spot. In experiments, the robot was subjected to repeated pushes. A virtual robot received much harder shoves.

Rebalancing should allow humans to interact more naturally with robots, letting them act as a physical guide, for example. If a controller tries to show other full-size humanoids how to perform a task by moving its limbs, there is a strong chance the thing will fall over.

It is interesting nonetheless!

Read the article and watch the movie. ^^

Posted in: News, Robot News.