Roz - Walking

So, we had a good time at CNRG last weekend. Roz, my new quad walker, came in second place in the walking competition. First place went to Mike Ferguson's Issy. You can see both of them, plus the third place finisher, in this video:



Roz was the first walker in that video, followed by Jeff, and then Issy. There's still lots of optimization to do with Roz...

I've also printed a new test leg that will have compliance - should be interesting to see how that affects things, and of course I'll have to figure out how to use this new-found capability once all the legs are done that way. To the right you can see the two parts, fresh out of the printer, with the support material still attached. As I type this, they are in the support bath removal tank.

On the mini-sumo front, Seeker 2x squeaked out with second place. First place honours went to Seeker 2, which was run by my son Nick. He won an Arduino experimenter's kit as his prize, which is pretty awesome. We also came away with a couple ArbotiX control boards, one of which is controlling Roz, and the other will be Nick's to allow him to play with Bioloids.

Roz - My New Robot

So, after a lot of thinking, and some time spent watching some Bioloid quads in action, I decided that even though MicroRaptor didn't work properly (AX-12 servos are good, but not powerful enough for a biped robot that heavy), I still wanted a limbed robot to continue my AI research with.

Enter Roz, my take on a Bioloid Quadropod.

It has 14 servos in total, 3 in each leg, and two for a pan/tilt head. Right now I just have a place-holder head attached, with a couple AX-S1's and a serial Jpeg camera. Eventually I will build a much more purposed head.

This body is designed to take an ArbotiX microcontroller board directly. I'll be getting one of those this weekend from the guy who makes them (hi Mike!), who is coming up to the CNRG.

Eventually, I'm going to replace that with a similar board, based on an ARM7 with a wifi interface.

Here's a video of Mike's quad, Issy, set up as a fire-fighter:



He's using a nice little IK (inverse kinematics) engine running on his ArbotiX. We're going to try and get that running on Roz this weekend - we'll see how that goes...

Seeker 2x - Finished!

So, its all done. We'll see how it does on Saturday at the CNRG.

I don't have my hopes up - this is a pretty much totally untested mini-sumo...

Sure looks pretty though.

Seeker 2x - Finishing It, Finally!

So, as many of you are aware (at least, if you've read this blog since the beginning), I have a new mini-sumo (Seeker 2x) that I started working on almost two years ago, but have yet to finish. The 2009 robot games (Canadian National Robot Games) is coming up in about three weeks, and I decided that I'm definitely going to compete with it.

There are only a few things left to do:

1. print a lid and the front lid mount (the front ProxDot sensor will be attached to this also), and attach it to the front bar
   
2. mold the tires
3. machine and mount the front scoop
4. paint it
5. finish the software

I've got the first tire in the mold now - hopefully it will come out nicely. The picture here shows the mold, with the tire (2-part polyurethane) freshly poured. I'll take it apart tomorrow, and see how it turned out.