Wandering with MaxSonar

[Midas]

My Robonova is a (removed by spam filter) wanderer now

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I used an ultrasonic MaxSonar sensor to avoid objects and furniture. And standard moves to run, walk, turn.

[Gerry52]

Nice job Midas!

When an object is very near to RN it's doing one or more backward steps. If the object is not so nearby it turns either left or right. How does your code make the decision for a left or a right turn?

Gerry

[Kilroym42]

That was really cool!!!!

Would you be willing to share your code?
I would really like to try somthing like that with my RN but my Basic is really basic.

[davidalecmcinnes]

Cool, like what you've done with the moves. I've been working on autonomous Robonova for a little while now. I use fused IR and ultrasonic sensor data to make his decisions; see vid

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I've now added short term memory so he doesn't get stuck in loops and emotion variables so he starts to exhibit behaviour as he interacts with his environment; he gets annoyed if he keeps falling over and stressed as his battery runs down.

Great work though, love this sort of thing; keep it up

[Midas]

Hello everyone!

Gerry52,
It uses RND function to turn randomly

Kilroym42,
Sure, although the code is as simple is it could be. Here is the code: http://www.mypsion.ru/files/walker.zip

davidalecmcinnes,
I liked it much! Your Robonova is very clever

[davidalecmcinnes]

I'm a little disappointed in the lack of interest in roaming Robonova as robots will be commonplace in the home in the future and autonomous roaming is one of the key requirements. It's a tricky and challenging job to arrange the sensors and responses to obtain robust behaviour in a chaotic environment.

I have a lot of plans and ideas in this field to develop Robonova into an independent interactive personality with emotions to include stress/calm, sad/happy, fear/confidence based on his interaction with people and the environment; these are expressed in his moves and body language at the moment but a speech synth would be cool.

I just got the PIR sensor working so he can detect people and signal for help when his battery's a bit low. A capability to charge his own battery would be useful, charging pad through his feet perhaps.

[Kilroym42]

I agree 100%
This is the reason I got my RN in the first place.
Have you looked into having some kind of voice interaction with your RN.


ps What PIR sensor did you use?

[davidalecmcinnes]

Me too, I was playing with high speed lego robots controlled with a PIC before but they kept bashing themselves to pieces. I had some inspiration from Stephen Baxters book Transcendent which gave a brief mention of George the robot companion with a very quirky personality, so when I found out about Robonova I snapped him up.

I've given it some thought before and I was going to add an SP03 but I heard the sound level is a bit low. There wasn't much around in speech recognition at the time.

Just had another look and the VRstamp module looks rather good. It's not too heavy on the power requirements either; I have to take a more detailed look at the spec and see how to talk to it.

It's probably worth setting up directional sound detection; that could be done as a separate circuit so he can understand voice and determine its source direction for a response.

I use the MS401 pyro sensor with a slow filter (0.2-0.5Hz) to reduce the transient spikes. It's possible to narrow the angle of detection with a tube aswell. Must do a vid of this.

[Humanoido]

These kinds of roaming programs have existed for some time in wheeled robots, such as the Parallax BoeBot. The code easily transfers to walking robots, such as Penguin Biped. Penguin uses an ultrasonic expansion. The stock robot includes IR and a "migrating" program that seeks North while avoiding objects. These programs can be adapted to sonar and Robonova quite easily. Parallax has a very large support base with many free downloads inclusive of code and instructional books. The PBASIC code is viewable with Windows Wordpad and the instructional books are in PDF format. The software can be downloaded at the Penguin Robot page.

http://www.parallax.com

There's also a Parallax robot support forum to answer questions.

http://forums.parallax.com/forums/
http://forums.parallax.com/forums/default.aspx?f=10

Penguin Robot Page (to download code)

http://www.parallax.com/Store/Robots/WalkingRobots/tabid/129/ProductID/438/List/1/Default.aspx?SortField=ProductName,ProductName

humanoido

[Humanoido]

Midas, great vid and job well accomplished!

humanoido