Friday Night Robotics * 3 – MANOI’s Holiday Xtravaganza Warmup

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, December 14th, 2009

This weekend really gives patronage to how challenging the sport of robotics is (Technically it’s not a sport since it’s not in the Olympics), and how frustrating everything can be!!!! >:(

Last year, MANOI barely showed off any holiday spirit. Just a seemingly 2D stocking sticky-tacked onto its head.

This year I really wanted to improve on that because… well, I don’t really have a reason. I just wanted to. I wanted to see what it would be like for MANOI to ring bells ^_^

The decorating started off with just a hat, followed by the hunt to find jingle bells that are a circle, not a bell. My mom eventually figured out the type of bell that I was looking for, and bought me some festive bells and bows!

Et voila, MANOI! C’est magnifique! (Tada, MANOI is magnificent!)

I spent an enormous amount of time getting various actions set up so that I can string them together into a final product. In total, there are 7 different movements. My favourite of which, called ‘tango’ can be seen in the video below where one of MANOI’s arms is outwards, and another is inwards, perpendicular to its front shell with the bow. Surprisingly enough, its only two motion frames:

It’s weird because tango looks way more complicated than a movement that has 6 frames, the ‘both arm jingle’. This is where MANOI jingles both of its arms, so one is back and the other is forwards, then the hands both jingle.

Crazy right? I’ve found that in most of my other MANOI motions, the movement was very focused, with no other moving parts. So I made sure to make the most things move at once. I think it gives off a more exciting vibe. ^_^ Check out the video!

It really wasn’t as easy as the video makes it look. There were a lot of times where various movements wouldn’t match up, so they would catch the balance off-guard. Also, one of MANOI’s ankle servos went crazy on me, so it let the other foot down, causing a fall.

It’s super challenging to fix this because when MANOI falls, there are at least two things that temporarily break. You fix those things, but while you’re fixing them, other things break. While you’re trying to fix the new things, you can’t get a good grip on the robot because its entire body is made up of servos, and if you set the robot down, another thing will break. I would be willing to wager that working in no-gravity is a cinch compared to this!

Once everything is working again, you go and fix the motion. Fixing the motion is a whole separate routine of trial and error- you change some of the values of the servos and see what happens. There are two options for the next step, either have super fast reflexes, or only program with one hand on the keyboard. Since macs are not very one hand friendly, I have to have super fast reflexes to turn the power switch off on MANOI so that it won’t fall. If it does fall, you have to go back and fix everything.

In any case, once the motion is fixed, you go back and try it with the other movements. Just your luck, the battery runs out! MANOI falls, and you have to fix everything again.

It’s so unbelievably frustrating!! >:( Especially doing it for 3 days straight! There have been three times where MANOI has fallen off the table, about 1 meter (3 feet) tall. The risk of this is MANOI getting shocked by me, the air, and the carpet! It’s really nerve wracking, but thankfully MANOI is alright. Here’s a video of all of MANOI’s falls from the various videos that I tried to take:

At the end of the day, I really enjoy seeing MANOI move around. I think of it this way: it is my frustration and patience that has given an otherwise inanimate object LIFE. How cool is that?

There will be more videos of MANOI in its holiday gear showing up soon, with more blinky lights too!

Posted in: Art, MANOI, Programming, Projects, Robot.

WCRS – Virtual Fun

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, February 2nd, 2009

The WCRS (Western Canadian Robotics Society) is most likely one of the most advanced hobby robotics club out there.

On Saturday at 9:00pm (EST) they had a gathering on the game Second Life. Second Life is an online 3D “game”, like the Sims, but with real people. Personally, as an RPG, I don’t really like it that much. However, as an online meeting place for clubs, I think it is an AMAZING idea!

There were a few people there, Craig (I think he runs/is one of the runners of the WCRS), Jon Hylands (he helped me get to Stanford!), Adam (???), Dan (from the SAIT). There might have been more, however I forget…

We had some fun with our avatars…

^ Dan dressed up as an i, Robot from the movie

^ Dan dressed up as a Robosapien hahahahaha

This was Craig’s avatar… SO AWESOME!

SL has a VoIP aspect of it too, so you can actually talk to people. We all introduced ourselves, it was pretty neat to see the variety of people there, even though it was a tiny group!

One of the things that was discussed was the building of the Island, and a group. They’re going to be creating virtual “offices” on their island. So, for instance, RobotGrrl.com’s office could have a banner on the outside of it, and perhaps a YouTube video playing in a loop too. We tested out playing YouTube videos, and it works amazingly well. Here you can see my video (with my real arm) inside of a non-real world.

How cool is that?!

Craig then gave me a teleportation link to visit the Museum of Robotics,

This place is pretty cool! I still haven’t looked at all of it. Something that I will have to do later! It also gave my avatar a free t-shirt. However, at that point, my avatar started to spin in a circle for some reason, and it couldn’t stop. I had to close SL…

Hopefully they will have more meetings in the future, I can’t wait to join in on them (and make a virtual office). Usually they send out a group notice on their message list, so if you want to subscribe to it, click here!

~~~

WOOHOO! I have many blog posts lined up!
Friday: Pololu Shipment
Sunday: Party Button Brainstorming
Sunday: L.A.S.E.R.

Keep looking forward to that! I will also make a post about FIRST sometime soon.

Posted in: News, Other, Projects, Robot News.

Hockey MANOI – a summary

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

I made a pretty good summary of Hockey MANOI in this thread at Trossen Robotics forum. I figured I should post it on my blog because it is a good summary and I broke it down into easy to read parts, so it’s like a whole JOURNEY of awesome!

Hello TRC World!

My project is a hockey playing humanoid.

It uses a MANOI AT01 kit, controlled by an Arduino (with an ATmega328) with a Wave Shield, and a SSC-32.

Humanoids have always been associated with walking or running. This project focuses on a different action for humanoids, skating. The end result of this project yields an interesting vision of the possibilities of skating robots.

Introduction

The idea came around when I was trying to make my humanoid (MANOI AT01) walk. Instead of taking a “big bite”, I decided to take a smaller bite and make it slide its feet. However, I quickly realized that when it slides its feet, it looks exactly like a newbie Canadian hockey player!

A Canadian newbie hockey player begins to skate by almost walking. Although the skater doesn’t go far, he does move forward due to the friction between the blade of the skate and the ice.

When I did notice this, I quickly grabbed some lego to create MANOI’s own version of skates, which are similar to rollerskates. I mounted the lego onto the feet using velcro.

The hockey stick I just found laying around. I had to cut a bit of it off, as it was too tall. I use tape and tie wraps to keep it mounted to MANOI.

Development

Development on this project was mainly trial and error. To get all of the motions correct so they all balance together was critical.

Instead of using the controller board that is usually used to control the MANOI, I did a major transplant and substituted it for the Arduino and SSC-32. This allows me to have much more flexibility in terms of sensing and creating motions. The H2H software was too problematic.

Usually what would happen is I would draw out a motion, on paper, that I would want to create, and I would put it into MANOI. Sometimes I got it first try, other times I didn’t. However, the cool part is that a lot of the motions stemmed from the ideas of other motions.

For instance, in the video of MANOI Skating with music (seen below), the motion where MANOI is running is actually a faster version of the sway motion! That was really surprising.

The development for the Wii nunchuck part of the code was quite easy as I had already established all of the variables and settings of when the nunchuck is tilted left or right, forwards or backwards. Instead of using real numbers for it though, I just defined a “home position” of the nunchuck, and subtracted or added numbers to the accelerometer axis, x y and z.

The music part of the wave shield was quite fun and straight forward. I looked around for the songs, and put them on a SD card which plugs into the wave shield. From there, it was just a simple method call inside of the Arduino.

Once the above developments were done, I wanted to create a version of MANOI that could sense if a ball/puck/object was there. I did this by using LDRs and LEDs.

Rest assured, I would have used IR Sensors if I had any This was the best alternative I had, though!

On the left side of the sticks the LEDs are in a yellow casing, and on the right side they are in a clear casing. There is some effect on the reading, however their values change precisely the same when an object is in front of the stick.

The black construction paper enclosure around the LDRs was required to direct the reading. Otherwise, the light from the LEDs saturated the reading and no difference was seen when an object was present or not.

I observed the change between the readings of when there was an object present, and when there was not an object present.

From this, I created a simple neuron, where if the input values succeed a predefined threshold, it will perform an action. In this case, the action would be to shoot the object.

I had to tweak the threshold a little to make it work with smaller objects, such as a roll of electrical tape.

In the video below, you will observe that it does work with a roll of electrical tape, a ball, and a spool of lead solder (the LEAD solder isn’t mine, it’s my DAD’s because he can’t use non-lead solder like the rest of us -_-;). The spool is white, which proves that the theory does work, meaning that the light that is reflected from the LEDs back into the same LDR board does not obscure the readings.

Results

Here are the videos that you can look at!

This is the first video, where I was just getting the motions down.

The program is basically a sequence of movements:

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

As you can see, the forward and backward movements both result in MANOI moving backwards. As I later found out, through trial and error, it was due to the Arduino and power cords limiting the movement of MANOI! Once they were mounted properly, it worked much better.

This is the second video, where MANOI is controlled by the Wii nunchuck!

You press Z to shoot, and you hold C and tilt to move it. MANOI can move forwards, backwards, left, right, and home.

This is there third video, where MANOI is playing a little game of hockey by himself while listening to some music. The song that you first hear is the Hockey Night in Canada theme song!

This is the last video, where MANOI can autonomously decide if he should shoot or not.

(The quality in that video is quite yucky, please check out the video on [URL="http://vimeo.com/2641041?pg=embed&sec=2641041"]vimeo[/URL] if you’d like to see it in better quality)

Conclusion

In conclusion, this project was SO much fun! The only time I didn’t enjoy it was when I was trying to hold MANOI, who was whacking me with its stick, with one hand and trying to type in some code with my other hand.

My favourite part was watching people play with the Wii version of the code. They really enjoyed it!

I also liked making the AI part too, that was pretty fun.

Next Steps

The next steps would include coding a modified version of the Bayes filter algorithm to predict if an object is in front of the stick or not.

More sensors would be fun, like three proximity sensors mounted on the front, left and right. This way MANOI could avoid opponents trying to take the ball off of it.

I would also add two more servos in the leg that would allow rotation. This would then allow me to create a more realistic skating humanoid, where there would actually be a stride.

Perhaps I could also add a camera to the head so that it could track where the ball/puck/object is.

That’s my project, I hope you like it! ^_^
You can see more of everything I mentioned at robotgrrl.com

Posted in: MANOI, Programming, Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, December 26th, 2008

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!
Best of all… it’s ROCK EM SOCK EM ROBOTS DAY! (Boxing Day)

Just as a fair warning, if this entry has more bizarre grammar mess-ups than usual, it’s because I ate too many jelly beans, and all I can think of is jelly beans! Robot jelly beans, jelly bean slushie, a meadow of jelly beans, jelly bean snow… *goes on and on* I think in pictures… and all I can think of right now is a DANCING JELLY BEAN ROBOT! Hahaha, joking. (Or am I?) ^_^

I hardly realized it was Friday today, so it doesn’t really feel like a FNR.

Last Friday, although I didn’t blog it, I was working on the LEDs that you’ll see on the stick, and the program! This Friday I tested and twirked the program so I can blog it.

Here is MANOI!

Do you notice something different about the stick?

The stick now has two perf boards on it! These perf boards have three yellow LEDs surrounding a LDR which has black construction paper around it.

The reason why I chose these yellow LEDs was nothing scientific. These were the only ones I had where I could have some consistency across the two boards. The LEDs on the left are inside of a yellow casing. The ones on the right are in a clear casing. There is a little bit of a difference in the readings of the LDRs, but they both work the same.

I would have really liked to do a different version of this but with an IR sensor and a FSR, but, as I mentioned above, these were the only things I had, and they will for sure get the job done!

What happens is the LDRs “spit out” a reading of the amount of light around it. I use the cardboard to ensure it is directed at what we want to be observing. When there is no object between the two LDRs, the reading is very high. Yet, when there is an object between the two, the reading drops a fair amount. This is because the LDR cannot sense the light from the opposite LEDs. I also tested this with a fairly white object (my DAD’s lead solder spool (eeew lead)) and it does work, meaning the reflected light from the LEDs back into the LDR (on the same board) does not obscure it. You can see for yourself in the video below.

I tinkered with the LDRs’ amount that it to create a threshold that will trigger MANOI’s shot. From what I learned at Stanford, this is simply called a neuron. It has input values, and if they meet a certain threshold,it will do something. This is a very primitive form of AI, but big things come in simple steps. =)

Here is a video of MANOI action! Pretend that the roll of tape is a hockey puck… it almost looks the same!

MANOI Hockey Robot AI from RobotGrrl on Vimeo.

It is also on youtube, here.

At the beginning, you see the LEDs flash. This means that the Arduino is soon going to evaluate the LDR levels. It takes five samples from each LDR, one every 500 ms. It then makes an average, which is the baseline used for comparing the LDR value against the threshold.

Yes, I agree, that this can completely become messed up. I will probably implement a markov approach to create (and update) the baseline. However, I’ll probably only do that after I make a modified Bayes algorithm for the AI.

You might have noticed something different about MANOI’s other hand. I’m giving it a gripping claw so that it can grip stuff. It won’t be meant to hold on to anything precious, but it could emphasize an effect here or there.

While I was adding on the boards, there was just not enough room for all of the stuff that I needed… like +5V and -Gnd. I made a thing with headers and inverted headers so I can easily plug it in!

It saves much needed space on the wave shield:

Just to add, today I was using an Arduino with an ATmega328.

There are more pictures that you can look at in this photoset on Flickr!

This project is almost finished! I just will add in an algorithm improving the AI, make more videos… and that’s it! I will continue the project later on, though with a few more things. I’ll add servos that can rotate the leg so I can make the robot actually skate, and many more things that I am still thinking of.

Can you believe that the Trossen Robotics robot contest deadline is really soon? Yikes!!
I just have to take a few more videos and work out what I will say in my post… what do you think the judges will be looking for? Hopefully it won’t end up like BubbleBoy in crabfu’s competition… x_x

Though, when crabfu was on Daily Planet (I actually saw it on TV (like two months before all of the robot websites started to go crazy over it), not on youtube) he described his robots as having character because you can interact with them through a control pad.

I think that is completely opposite, because then it is just the human expressing their character through a machine. When you don’t have to use a remote, yet the robot still interacts with its environment, that’s when a robot truly has character. :d

Now we know why BubbleBoy obviously lost… He can have his definition, and I’ll have mine. His works are very interesting though! I never knew you had to start a fire to make a steam thingy move. I figured you would just boil water or something… hahahaha (I never thought as far as you would need fire to make water boil, though… EPIC NOT-WIN!) XD

I hope you really enjoyed this blog post. It makes a lot more sense now that one can see what the finished robot will look like!

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

Rodney’s Robot Revolution

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on 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)

Posted in: News, Robot News.

Friday Night Robotics

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 12th, 2008

My Friday night robotics are BACK! Throughout the week I was working on speech recognition… Friday I took a bit of a break and soldered up the Motor Shield!

The Motor Shield is pretty awesome since it has 2 H-bridges. Soldering it up was pretty fun- even with a melted soldering iron!

Once it was all soldered up… I first tried the servos. Their motion is so much stronger than the servos I’m using in BubbleBoy! I’m going to try to use ServoTimer library on BubbleBoy again (previous attempts have been extremely frustrating). Maybe he’ll be more “emo”

The DC motors scared me as I extremely didn’t expect them to work the first time! Which is sort of ironic because, even though they did work, I didn’t have them plugged in right, so they didn’t move backwards. The solution was to not over-think it, and just plug it in (Like below)

The motors went to the GearBox, externally powered with +3V. The batteries were slowly fading away, so it became kinda fun to spin the gears ^_^

I made a video of my fingers spinning the gears (rofl):

So yeah… this is great! I’m probably going to make a shield for a RBBB to attach the motor sheild. Or something like that. I need to get one of those rechargable batteries wrapped in lime green shrink wrap as all of the motors will be powered. (There’s 4 of them!) It’s going to be a really powerful robot O_O

Oh yeah! I’m not sure what I did to my camera *coughdroppeditcough* but it takes REALLY nice pictures now… it does the effect that I’ve been trying to achieve on macro for ages now- softens the background a lot, crisp in the front (you can see it in the soldering iron pic). Yay!! =D

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Stuff!!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

^_^ Thanks to very kind people, I had a $200 gift certificate at Adafruit and was able to buy stuff!

• Arduino
• 2 ProtoShields
• Arduino bootloader
• Multimeter
• Boarduino
• Motor Shield
• Wave Shield

All of these are going to be extremely helpful @_@ In fact, the old multimeter broke just the other day ^^;

What’s a little cool is that the Arduino now has Italy on the back! Someone who had the Arduino at Stanford also had this style, so I guess it’s kind of cool that I had one of the Arduino Dicemilas without the map The motor shield sounds a lot of fun… as does the wave shield! I’m not sure which ones I’ll put together and test first…

Either way, I now have lots of interesting stuff to keep me entertained for a while longer

Thanks Ron & Evelyn!!!
(and I hope I won’t blow any of them up)

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.