Hudson, the butler bot.
I got the Drive motors and wheels mounted last night, the battery controller circuit and motor controller all mounted, and all the wires have been put through. As a test I used the 5v regulated power and the Signal and power leads for the motor controller to hook it up to an RC reciever, so I could hook it all up and test the drive system. The videos I have attached show off the drive system, going over Large Tile, Medium tile and carpet... I had to help the transition for carpet a little bit, it high centered while moving over. I probably need to drop down the casters just a little more.
Let me know what you think!
I have added on the Distance sensors on front, also reconfigured the Arm a bit. I then have spent the last few days soldering together a breaker box, essentially that connects both batteries together and outputs all the votages I need. I have the 11.1v LiPo going in one side, and the 7.4v liPo going in the other, outputs vary, a kinect power adapter output, 1 11.1v output for the motor controller, a 7.4v output for the Servos, and a 5v output for the Logic for the Servo Controller. Oh and I added Tension springs to the arm so my servos don't die lol. Now all I need to do is get the drive system in place, which I found out I don't have the apropriate hubs for the wheels :\ so i will have to to wait to get those in before it is moving... I have though about jerry rigging the the hubs to work.. or gettings the bigger wheels that I do have hubs for but I haven't decided which yet.




Due to over heating computer issues, this is now the third time I will be attempting to write this :\
Hudson, is a butler robot, I'm designing him to initially grab snacks and be asked to go get various items.
Here is his Specs:
Hardware-
-Arduino microcontroller serial connected to a Lynxmotion SSC32 servo controller
-A robotic arm, brackets and base are all parts from Lynxmotion, servos are kind of a hodge podge of different types.
-2 IR sensors, both for wall and stair sensing(so he doesn't take a fumble :P )
-A ultrasonic range sensor for long distance sensing.
-Microsoft Kinect, for 3d vision sensing
-Motors for the drive system are, 12v Geared motors, stall torque is 231.5 oz-in, 152 rpm
-The Brains, HP Mini 1000 netbook, running Ubuntu and ROS from Willow Garage
So yeah my robot so far. Let me know what you think. I'm open to suggestions.
Thanks for viewing.




@ Sat, 2011-12-24 15:20
cheers!
oooh, kinect, i wonder, do you need to buy the whole xbox for the kinect? i don't want to have 2 xboxes! :D
@ Mon, 2011-12-26 05:15
Nope you can buy them
Nope you can buy them separately from the Xbox
I got mine refurbished from Game Stop.
@ Fri, 2011-12-23 13:51
Very cool robot! Are you
Very cool robot! Are you planning to do any slam? or vision processing, this is going to be a very interesting robot when your done!
@ Sat, 2011-12-24 00:15
Yes, I'm going be using SLAM
Yes, I'm going be using SLAM as my main state machine, and the openni_kinect will be used for video processing and hopefully if I can build it object recognition.
Thanks
@ Thu, 2011-12-22 21:01
This is a serious robot. I
This is a serious robot. I like it that you are using a drive system more substantial than an Irobot Create--which is what usually gets bundled with a netbook and a Kinect. I'm looking forward to seeing more of this.
@ Thu, 2011-12-22 23:23
Yeah, I have an IRobot
Yeah, I have an IRobot Vacuum, I think its a 530 (got it on woot.com), I checked it to see if it could handle the weight, balanced the base(almost 3lbs by itself) on it, and then set it to vacuum, then I started putting stuff on it, like a drill(around the same weight as the Kinect) and the batteries, and the arm... it got very slow very quickly... kinda figured I'd have to beef it up a little. The motors I have now were at a reasonable price so i got them.
Thanks for your interest :D
@ Fri, 2011-12-23 04:21
How far along are you in
How far along are you in learning ROS? Have you made your way through the ROSSERIAL tutorials yet? Is there a particular stack you're basing your project on?
I'm hoping to use a PandaBoard as an SBC. But there are a lot of dependency issues.
@ Fri, 2011-12-23 05:00
I just got past the services
I just got past the services part of the Tutorial pages, I'll be using Openni_kinect stack, slam, Arduino stack, and Rviz for sure...
Right now I'm not really useful :P
@ Fri, 2011-12-23 18:35
Heh. No surprise there.
Heh. No surprise there. I was just curious. There's not a lot of really useful information out there, such as published code outside of the tutorials. I hope to change that in the coming weeks.
@ Sat, 2011-12-24 00:14
Yeah... they share a bit of
Yeah... they share a bit of code here and there on the answers.ros.org
But they could share a little more :P
I'll just have to tear through some of the other packages and see how they work in order to get a better understanding of it.