Competition Assignment no.3

Vesna got some good sleep this afternoon and came to the lab fresher than ever, so we managed to finish the third task too

What’s it all about: The Pushbox Obstacle – the robot must push away the cardboard box and go through the 2 sidegates. Like in this picture:

Now we’re (almost) sure that by tomorrow at 18 we’ll have all the 5 tasks completed

This is how BALL-E acts on the third task:

Competition assignment no.2

a.ka. Open Door and Go Into Garage:

We’re working on this one today. Wish us tons of goodluck

UPDATE at 16:30:

The three boys from the team are thinking hard and trying to make it work. See?

Aaaand… it works! Like in this video:

Day 3 Lecture: Robots

Again a very nice lecture We saw different type of robots and found out about a lot of interesting robot competitions. At one point the proffessor asked us two questions and we’re supposed to answer here. So:

1.) What robot would you create?

We watched some videos about robots on YouTube and we found out BigDog which is the most impressive robot we’ve ever seen.

BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog’s legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight.

BigDog has an on-board computer that controls locomotion, servos the legs and handles a wide variety of sensors. BigDog’s control system manages the dynamics of its behavior to keep it balanced, steer, navigate, and regulate energetics as conditions vary. Sensors for locomotion include joint position, joint force, ground contact, ground load, a laser gyroscope, and a stereo vision system. Other sensors focus on the internal state of BigDog, monitoring the hydraulic pressure, oil temperature, engine temperature, rpm, battery charge and others.

We think that this type of robot is very useful in military purposes. It can help a lot in reducing the number of deaths in wars and not only. So we would like to develop a similar robot.

2.) If you had the necessary money, what robot would you buy?

After playing for a while with Aibo, we all agreed that he would be the perfect pet, so we want to take him home (buy him)

Competition assignment no.1

Find and measure distance to box - this is our first task:

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As this was the first complex-task we had to do with BALL-E, it took longer than expected to do it right. After the planning and the programming part, the robot was just moving back and forward and back and forward and back… you got the idea So we rechecked the program and did the debugging step by step.

After something like 15 tries, BALL-E managed to follow correctly the line. Something like this:

Now we’re working on the ‘measure the distance’ part and it’s all done. We predict that we’ll finish this today and hope that the other 4 tasks will go smoothly

Assignments for the Competion

… which will take place on Friday afternoon are here:

Competition Assignments

Now the rest of the team is already working on the first one while I’m keeping you up-to-date with our progress.

Signed: (sleepy) Alina.

Sensors in mobile robots

a.k.a Day 2 Lecture:

sensorsssc08a

sensorsssc08b

Really interesting one

(at the end we saw the robot-vacuum-cleaner in action!)