20 May 2010
eventsissymech-warfarerobotsros
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.
09 Apr 2010
arbotixrobots
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.
P.S. You can see it all in action on Andrew's RX-64 based quadruped -- powered by NUKE:
13 Mar 2010
3d-printingarbotixsmaldogrobots
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....
