Author Topic: MiniEric goes to Fire Fighting  (Read 2079 times)

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Offline Ro-Bot-XTopic starter

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MiniEric goes to Fire Fighting
« on: November 22, 2009, 11:01:59 PM »
Or better said, almost competes. Why? I thought it wasn't ready. As a perfectionist, I tend to get unhappy with how my robots are working and that is not good. Sometimes we need to take a break, step back, clear our minds, talk to other people explaining how it didn't work. This will spark some new ideas and perhaps new ways to make things work at least good enough, if not perfect. But more on the story on my blog (the link is in my signature), I'm too tired to write it again for every forum I go to.

Regardless of the failures, MiniEric gets better and better. Soon it will be able to do what a normal butler robot does, clean up, bring things, scare the cat and more. I can't wait for the second half of December and firs half of January, when I don't have much work to do. MiniEric will get my attention, I hope to get it as close as possible to my goals.

Ok, here is the video:
[youtube]i2_eZ48M438[/youtube]
« Last Edit: November 23, 2009, 09:10:48 AM by Ro-Bot-X »
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Offline Joker94

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Re: MiniEric goes to Fire Fighting
« Reply #1 on: November 23, 2009, 05:09:10 AM »
great work. And boy i tell you mini eric has come a long way interms of how it looks. Can't wait to see what happens next.

Offline madsci1016

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Re: MiniEric goes to Fire Fighting
« Reply #2 on: November 23, 2009, 06:06:07 PM »
Nice work.

Question though, is that servo jitter on the head, or something else causing it to shake?

Offline Ro-Bot-XTopic starter

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Re: MiniEric goes to Fire Fighting
« Reply #3 on: November 23, 2009, 08:51:32 PM »
The pan and tilt servos are the cheap HXT900 micro servos. The head is a bit too heavy and it stays balanced on the  tilt servo. If it starts to fall in one direction or another, the servo will try to compensate, but being poor quality it jitters and starts to oscillate. It needs to be replaced by a better quality servo. I just received another relatively cheap servo to replace it, but it is a bit longer so I need to mod the support. I'll report back if it improves things.

On the other hand, the pan servo should not jitter that much. But I'm using the new Arduino Servo library that uses Timer1 and interrupts to set the pulses. I also use the I2C interface that is using interrupts too. Sometimes they interfere. I had bigger problems when I was running everything on one board. Now I have it separated in 4 boards (4 MCUs). Now I can have the robot sing and dance at the same time. I can have it on waiting for voice commands while executing another task. The boards send and receive stuff to each other as needed, so far so good.

I also need to slow down the servos, they move like Admin's karate ERP. I'll take a look at his code to see what I can do about this.

But more importantly, I need to focus on the robot's senses. So far only the Ping sensor and the Thermopile Array are working properly. I have problems with the Sharp sensors, they give me weird measurements, not sure yet where the problem is. With a wall at a constant distance (nothing moves) the measurement increments with random values, although I reset the variable each time before the measurement is taken. The Ping sensor is much more stable, at a fixed distance, it gives me the same reading and it has faster refresh rate than the Sharp Sensor, although it uses sound not light.

So, a lot more work is needed until the robot will be able to fetch that beer!
Check out the uBotino robot controller!

 


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