Too late for a Bot-Trot 4 Bottle Race?

[hivemind]

We've got Zog Doing the Bot - Trot with flying colours

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-Chris

[NovaOne]

Good control, at quite a respectable pace.

Could you tell us more about how you integrate such smooth continuous turning into your control loop?

[hivemind]

Thanks! We are pleased with their performance so far. In fact, we have gotten the bots both running on many different surfaces (melomine as shown here, wood, tiles, thin rugs, cement - with sand/debris) and retain this rate of stability.

We have a standard forward walking loop, and then we take analog input from a PS3 controller (one of the joysticks, or the IMU - both have been tested, but the stick was found to be more ergonomic) to "mix" in the turning. We use the mix to elongate the steps and shift the weight - thus turning the bots while they continue to walk forward. This works for both a forwards and backwards walk.

[hivemind]

With Zog running circles around bottles, I thought I would let Oro take a shot at an incline plane:

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He does pretty well, but is required to side-step in order to regain balance near the top.

-Chris

[StuartL]

That's very cool. Presumably that's IMU driven? Are you doing full inverse kinematics to get that far or just using IMU to modify preset steps?

[hivemind]

We are developing a full IK for our robot, but we found that for a lot of things this simply isn't necessary. For this specific move we generated point-to-point moves and enhanced them with dynamic mixing. And while our robot does have a 6-axis IMU, it was not utilized in this move-set, at least for this slope, it was entirely unnecessary - once again, we just used dynamic mixing to compensate.

-Chris