I recently split my Trashbot in half to finally get hold on the walking patterns of the lower part, as I changed the controller from Arduino Nano to Raspberry Pi. Here’s the upper part:

Trashbot upper body incl neck & head

With the recent progress of running Oculus Rift from a Pi 3 and the experiments of streaming video from the stereo cam Blackbird 2, I thought it was a great idea to attach the camera to the upper part of Trashbot and send the Oculus head orientation to the neck controlling Arduino Mini Pro.

First step is to get the Arduino run with the PC again. But oh, that shitty servo:

So, before diving deeper into head synchronous robotic telepresence, I’ll need to fix that bugger…

Last week I added three degrees more to Trashbot, two hip servos for forward movement (“kicking”) and one to the bone.

This week I found some time to do the first single servo movements and tests to check out the new geometry of the bot since the broader hips will affect the Center of Gravity etc. Here’s the first attempt to do what the normal gait would do: shift the body to one foot:

So, definetly software teaching me how to improve hardware… Next draft iteration: Continue reading →

I’ve been working on Trashbot for quite a while now, but the basic gait mechanism is still the same as in version one. The hips’ movements and the distance between the legs define the possible step length. This is annoying since the robot is rather tall and you’d expect that he’ll walk a bit faster than he actually does. However, moving faster induces stronger vibrations in the skeleton and makes him fall much easier.

Also, the upper part of the body will tilt “stronger” when Continue reading →

recently, i had the idea to attach a laser pointer to trashbot’s neck and investigate the amplitudes of the laser on the ceiling. this time, the blog entry is shorter but the “how-to” is in the video:

from the results you can see much better the difference between active balancing:

vs no balancing (the spine is stiff, the upper body moves with the hip, thus larger amplitudes):

with this technique, i hope to be able to document further improvements on the movement, especially when i connect the gait pattern with the balancing mechanisms as scientific robots do.

i recently contrasted trashbot 3’s walk with the spine balancing or bein static and was not happy with the result of the video. one can have the impression that active vs non-active balancing is somewhat similar but in fact the real robot “feels” different as we’ve seen in the video above.

next, i’ll attach a little camera (gopro clone) to the trashbot’s chest to view the gait from “first person” perspective…