Yesterday night we finished fully assembling the first robot. What’s missing now are the cabling and the software, as well as the other robots. So hopefully it won’t be long before we can start showing videos again.
Legs with torso
Rails to hold the electronics and the battery
Waiting for the arms and the head
Fully assembled, sitting around while the FU Racing Team is occupying the field.
Only cabling and software is missing now.
Notice the bars we added to the legs, these are helping keeping the legs stiff.
The back of the robot. The additional motor at the back helps balance the torso.
Yesterday we got the new link parts for the legs. Having now all parts for the legs together, we just had to put one pair of legs together. Tomorrow we hope to finish the upper body, so if all goes well there is one completely assembled robot on Friday (wish us luck).
Almost done are also our new electronic components. On the left you see the new power suppy (not fully assembled) and on the right the updated motorboard which is going to control the servo motors and additionally controls the IMU. 7 weeks and 2 days to go until we leave for RoboCup German Open.
Work on the updated robots continue. Yesterday we spent many hours in the mechanic workshop producing distance pieces and bearing caps for the robots’ legs. Today we will finish the huft and knee parts in the lab. This leaves just a few pieces to produce, which means that hopefully in a week we will start assembling the new models.
After the initial prototype of a new upper robot body and a second one with further modifications, we asked the physics’ mechanics department to make us pretty ones based on that. The results arrived now, which brings us closer to assemble the full 2013 model.
Due to the now missing sensors in the feet, the walking of the robots had to be updated to be stable again. To show you the progress we made so far, here’s a short video (recorded in early December, more updates will follow!):
The university was closed during the holidays (christmas and new years) and just opened again yesterday. All robots are back from their short vacation and robot Ada wanted to show you some of her christmas pictures.
In order to analyse the self-localization and world modelling, as well as to assist in machine learning approaches to various parts of the robot software, ground truth data is needed – i.e. the correct information where the robot actually is, and where the ball is. With that information we can compare the robot’s perception of the world with reality. This aids in evaluation of our performance, but it also allows the robot to get insight into what it is doing wrong and try to learn from it.
In order not to re-invent the wheel, we used the vision system of the Small Size League. Recycling the heads of last year’s robots, we mounted a camera over each field half. They are observing the field, looking for the ball and the robot markers. In the picture below, we put the markers on top of our dummy robot. We can also put it on top of the robots, though this is currently a bit tricky. However the new torso has been prepared to make this easier.
As usual this is always open for improvement, but so far it looks quite promising. The next months will show how useful this system is in our preparations.
For the past two years, our robots utilized an ARM microcontroller to communicate with the servos. For 2013, we are going to update this system big-time with these new features:
multi-channel communication to servos (allows to talk to torso, left and right leg independently for increased communication speed)
two ARM M4 microcontrollers, one to handle the IMU and one to handle servo communication and motion execution
up to 5 buttons and LEDs for manual control of the robots
piezo for simple sound output (e.g. warning of low battery)
imprinted logo
A first prototype was developed and successfully tested for the Berlin United Racing Team, an updated model has just been finished (picture below) and awaits final programming.
