Boxer Robot

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Bob, worked up a new tabletop, mechanical design, that has downward looking IR sensors. It is more suited toward the challenge goal which is to find a 2x2 box and push it off the table. Bob built two robot chassis, and all I need to do was add my own wheels, and electronics. This provided me with an opportunity, to turn up some all-aluminum wheels on my new 9x20 lathe. Here is the robot with my home-made aluminum wheels mounted to it.

It took a day or two, to mount up some electronics, to get it driving around the table about as well as the Phase 1 robot "Mr. Bricks". Here is a photo of both of our robots all fitted with electronics. Still needs some work, but it is a good start toward a better overall design.

This robot is turning into a reusable platform that could be used for more than the tabletop challenge....perhaps even a Trinity fire-fighter! Here is a shot of the board stack that Bob and I designed for this robot. Lots of MCU processing horsepower in there. All total there are 10 PIC's working in parallel to solve the computing problems.

It has a main board for motor driving, with add-on modules for reading sensors, a main brain module with lots of memory, and finally, a fire-fighting board for dealing specifically with fire-fighting sensors when we get that far along.

I have actually used the firefighting board by bolting the appropriate sensors to the top of the robot and rewriting most of the software to focus on a fire-fighting house. Click here for more information on Boxer, retooled for the Trinity Firefighting competition.

Here are the pair of robots with all the electronics mounted on-board. Yes, you guessed it, it even has a CMUcam interface for chasing that tabletop soccer block. I have the CMUcam mounted on my robot in this photo of the pair, together at a recent robot club meeting. I still have yet to begin figuring out how I am going to read the camera and deal with the sensor fusion. I will probably wait until Phase 3 to figure it all out.

I have recently finished debugging all the motion control for these robots. Heh...it's not a coincidence that thereis a huge control theory book in the background on that photo.

Anyway, I shot some video clips of the two robots first steps around the kitchen using full dual-differential drive PID control, using all this new motor driver hardware, and a self-designed control algorithm derived from reading a bunch of books on control theory.

In these clips, my goal was to drive a few feet, in a straight line, make a perfect 180 degree turn and drive back. I am using wheel odometery to measure my distance traveled, and to work on that perfect 180 degree turnaround.

Video Clip #1 - My robot base attempting the first drive. It has a few glitches to be worked out.

Video Clip #2 - I used modified version of the algorithm in Bob's base, and it is working really good now. Back and forth, without deviating that much.