Leg for a holonomic eobot using the large EV3 motor

The large EV3 motor has a different form factor then the NXT motor. I had to redesign the legs of Agilis to make use of these new motors.

The new design is smaller and much prettier to the eye. The smaller size and all the triangular shapes makes the leg very stable. The new leg can be fitted on the same triangular frame that was used for Agilis.

Here are the building instructions for the new leg.

If you only have two large EV3 motors you can easily modify the leg to use the EV3 medium motor. This motor can be attached directly to the drive axis of the wheel and to the underside of the frame. You will have no gearing. But as the medium motor rotates a bit faster you will still have plenty of speed in your robot.

Improved building instructions for Agilis

I got some feed-back on my last post with “building instructions” for Agilis. My friend Kirk wondered why I didn’t make proper instructions. He was not impressed by my lame excuses about odd angles or illegal builds and showed me things could be done. He was right, it was about time for me to master some Lego CAD tools. I choose to use LDraw and MLCad for the job. My fears for a steep learning curve proved wrong. The manual is quite good and I was up and running within an hour. The hardest thing to learn was the discipline to work precise immediately. One cannot build a sketch at first and then improve the model. Well, technically you can, but you shouldn’t as every brick you move triggers a chain of new moves that need to be made.

It was fun to create proper building instructions for Agilis. Along the way I also improved the gearbox as was suggested by another reader of my blog, Thimoty. You can freely download the instructions. I do appreciate constructive feedback. This is my first and I am sure there is room for improvement.

Download the building instructions for Agilis

Ballbot

Remember my plan to make a ball balancing robot? Last year I set myself the goal to make a ball balancing robot. I even build the robot. Since then I wondered off my original goal and made a guardbot, Koios, from this platform. Now I am having another shot at making a balancing robot.

Programming a balancing robot is easy in theory. You just need a sensor that tells you how much the robot is tilted, most often people use a gyro for this. I use my IMU for this, so that I do not suffer from gyro drift. The tilt angle is then feeded to a PID-controller that transformes tilt to motor speed. The hard part is to tune the PID controller, it has to translate tilt into just the right amount of motor speed, too little and the robot falls of the ball, too much and the robot goes over the top and falls of on the other side of the ball. Falling of the ball damages the robot. So I had a problem, how to tune the PID controller without damaging the robot?

To be able to tune the PID-controller without damaging the robot I made a special platform. It is a large disk with a small pole in the middle pointing down Due to the pole the disk will always be tilted when lying on the ground, only when it balances perfectly on the pole it is level. Therefore this disk can be used to tune the controller.  The robot can ride off the disk, but it doesn’t fall then, it just comes on the floor with one or two wheels.  

When I tested this setup I discovered that the disk whas too smooth, the wheels didn’t have enough grip and slipped. To increase the friction I coated the surface of the disk with sillicon rubber, It is the light blue surface you see in the picture. Now I have a very “slick” surface.I only hope it lasts under the forces the NXT motors generate.But for the moment this problem is solved.

But there are other problems. One is the fact that these holonomic wheels make the robot vibrate, this affects the IMU filter, there is still some drift although it stays within certain limits. I do have prototype rotacaster wheels. The manufacturer told me that the production wheels are more round and generate less vibrations. If you are ever going to by these wheels, and they are a lot of fun, I advice you to take the black ones. They have the best grip. Anyway, I will have to tune the IMU as well.

Tuning PID controllers is difficult and very, very time consuming. There is some theory around tuning PID controllers but in the end it is mostly trial and error. Everytime I want to try a new set of parameters I’ll have to modify the program, download it to the brick, run the program and evaluate the results by watching the robot. It is hard to understand what goes wrong when you see the robot ride of the disk and make a run for the door to the staircase.

But not anymore. Kirk, one of the developers of Lejos made a very nice program that allows you to tune a running PID controller during over bluetooth. The tool is still under development so you won’t find it in Lejos 0.9.1 yet. This program is an add-on to the charting logger I often use to evaluate internals of the robot on the PC. So basicly, this program shows me what is going on in my robot and allows me to modify PID parameters on the fly. I think this is a great tool. Below is a screen shot of it.

So, now I have the robot, a test platform and a efficient tuning tool. That must mean immediate succes! Well, to be honest I don´t think so. I´m still not sure if I can get this robot to work as there are problem with weight and inertia as well. The robot weigths 998 grams. This is quite heavy, even for three powerful NXT motors. The robot is quite stiff, but there it still bends a bit under weight. This affects the IMU sensor. And I´m working on other projects as well. So in the end I think there is a bigger chance to fail than to succeed.

To be continued.

Rotacaster wheels

For my birthday I got the Rotacaster wheels, four of them!

They are nice! A bit smaller than I expected, but the size is perfect. It gave me some new challenges. I never built a triangular robot before.
Below are the first picturesof my triangular robot. For prototype I’m rather pleased with it, it is compact, lightweight and sturdy. The only real issue with the robot is that I cannot replace the batteries without removing the NXT from the chassis.

The robot features a US-sensor, giving it a face and a front side, a Mindsensors medium range distance sensor, a Hitechnic gyro sensor and a Mindsensors accelerometer. There is a Mindsensors sensor port splitter on the bottom of the robot that it is out of view. Currently only the gyro is functional, it helps the robot to keep its orientation.

There is not much programming done yet. The only new stuff I wrote thus far deals with driving. The robot can drive in any direction. It can spin around its vertical axis and it can orientate itself in a certain direction. It can do all off this at the same time. It is really funny to look at the robot performing some of the patterns that I used for testing.
I’m not sure what kind of behaviour I will give this robot. My son wants to control it with a joystick. So that might be the first thing to implement.

The robot does not have a name yet. Any suggestions?