Bioloid handstand

[limor]

Not quite there but getting very close.

As you may know RoboSavvy is sponsoring some humanoid robotics research at the University of Lisbon.

We've submitted a first article about the research work to an IEEE robotics conference called Robotica2007. The article got accepted for a poster presentation.

We haven't quite reached the objectives of the research (which includes getting the Bioloid to do a hand-stand) so the article simply describes the development environment that has evolved over the past 6 months.

Documenting the development environment is also work-in-progress but you will eventually find all the information here on robosavvy probably on the wiki pages. The 3D model of the Bioloid was previously posted on this forum by rustyarmor and some of the software is on SVN at sourceforge.net

[pepperm]

Fantastic Limor, what a great project.

Mark

[Ray]

I appreciate your (all the related people) great works over the year

Limor, Can this gyro board can be used together with Bioloid's software,

If it can, I hope it can be made in mass production

Is this the first serially controlled Robot with gyro?


Cheer!

[limor]

Thanks for the kind words!
It is quite an exciting project because we get to learn every little detail about the robot and how to control it and we are creating the first-ever foundation for affordable humanoid control research.

My aspiration is to get these humanoids (including the KHR, Manoi and Robonova) to run and skateboard and one of the first necessities on the way to achieving these goals is to be able to read and process many sensors and change the motor direction at 100 control-cycles/sec.

The board we used is the Pepper board which was discussed in previous threads and in this blog entry. And - yes, it behaves exactly like an AX12 or AXS1 so you can use the standard Behavior Control software with it.

However, you don't need to develop your own board. RoboSavvy has imported a bunch of tiny Audrino boards from Sparkfun (see the robosavvy store).
The Audrino board is similar to the Pepper board and the same software that was developed for the Pepper board can be used with the Audrino. I haven't had time to test this properly but I was hoping someone from the forum will precede me in doing so.

[pepperm]

For those who are interested in the Pololu board approach, I did develop a piggy back board for this product that enables all sorts of things to be connected to the Bioloid Bus. Pev also developed code that works on it to allow you to begin developing further code. Here is a picture of the board with an accelerometer on it


and here is the Eagle pcb design
http://robosavvy.com/Builders/pepperm/PololuDaughterV1.x.zip

Mark

[JonHylands]

My aspiration is to get these humanoids (including the KHR, Manoi and Robonova) to run and skateboard and one of the first necessities on the way to achieving these goals is to be able to read and process many sensors and change the motor direction at 100 control-cycles/sec.

Hey limor,

Very cool stuff...

I'm planning on doing something similar, now that I have some real horsepower onboard the robot (600 MHz gumstix). The very first thing I'm going to implement beyond the pass-through pipeline (bioloid bus/usb <-> gumstix <-> wifi/pc) will be a SYNC_READ command. The gumstix will keep a local copy of each servo's sensor values, and will send them through the wifi connection all in one shot, rather than having to send 24 individual queries...

Eventually, we're going to move more of the low-level control functions onboard the gumstix, and keep the high level "brain" processing on the pc.

My six-axis IMU has the control table entries for the gyros and accelerometers updated 100 times per second right now, so I don't see any problems with getting "balance" data at 100 Hz as long as it stays local to the gumstix...

- Jon