Bioloid Quad Walker Robot - Roz

[JonHylands]

A number of years ago, I built a bioloid-based quadruped walker robot which I called Roz. Originally controlled using an Arbotix (Arduino-like) board, two years ago I updated it to be controlled with a Beaglebone Black running Python. Programming robots in python is great, but running full-blown linux on small robots is not fun (mainly due to boot time).

Here's a video showing Roz with an Arbotix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6le3z78TK74

And here's a video showing Roz walking under python control:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBNOs9JHqXA

Now that my brother Dave has successfully tweaked the right settings in the UART so the pyboard can talk to Bioloid servos, I'm converting Roz to run MicroPython.

Here's a picture of Roz, with a new head, and one of my custom MicroPython boards mounted:



The wiring and hookup is all done, and now I'm working on porting my IK and control code over to MicroPython...

[JonHylands]

And here's a video of Roz walking, powered by one of my custom MicroPython boards:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL9w-wTjzeM

This is definitely the first step in what I hope will be a lot of software updates for this robot.

[JonHylands]

And here's a nicer picture:

[pythoncoder]

Most impressive! What type of sensors are you using in the head? Roughly how many lines of Python are involved?

[JonHylands]

The sensors in the head are Sharp analog IR sensors, although they are the close-range sensors, and only "see" for 8". I need to swap them out with a set of GP2D12's, which can range out to something like 30".

Total lines of code is 1650 right now, with 691 of those lines being Dave's bioloid bus UART & packet stuff, and the other 959 being robot-level stuff. The IK and Gait code combined is ~400 lines.

- Jon

[marfis]

The movement look really realistic I'm impressed.

So I wonder because you've done the project 2 times right? Using Arduino and uPy.

Which one went smoother? Did you encounter problems in using uPy for such complex applications?

[JonHylands]

I don't consider this a complex project. I'm just getting started with it.

Using MicroPython is way nicer, mainly because I like Python orders of magnitude more than I like C++. I'm actually an old-time Smalltalk programmer, and Python is as close as I've found to the feel of Smalltalk.

I haven't run into any major problems, mainly because my brother took care of the low-level interfacing to the bioloid bus, so I could concentrate on the robotics part of this project.

[kfricke]

Lucky one !

[JonHylands]

The code for this is available on my Github repository:

https://github.com/JonHylands/roz

It also requires the bioloid interface code from my brother's repo:

https://github.com/dhylands/bioloid3

[JonHylands]

I did a blog post yesterday showing how I'm starting to use the range finders on the head for scanning:

http://blog.huv.com/2015/12/roz-obstacle-scanning.html