Category Archives: aMoSeRo

aMoSeRo – very first mapping view available

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After days with latex and struggling with all sensor data a mobile robot needs, today is the first day of ROS showing me a small map view. It’s anything but stable and I can’t claim understanding everything – but because I’ve hadn’t something to report for some time now here a small demonstration:

First Mapping Experience

Screenshot fromMAP

ScreenshotTopics Topics Overview – amosero a distributed system still far from optimal

Because my IMU doesn’t do its work as it should, I’ve used a WiiMote Motion + and run it by a common ros driver and bluetooth.

Yeeeha 🙂

aMoSeRo xbox controller support

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ROS is amazing. After installing the xbox drivers (xboxdrv) on linux, following some well written instructions and writing about 100 lines of own code – the aMoSeRo is now able to be controlled by an xbox controller.

Driving the robot around the house revealed the real power behind the two RB-35 (1:30). Not to fast to control but very strong driving over piles of books the motors seemed to be a good choice.

Some issues with the wheels – a lot of force beeing at work, especially along the positive and negative y-axis (see REP103 post) will be solved soon by some super glue 🙂

So demonstrating the robot in future will be a lot more easy and controllable – and a lot more fun!

 

aMoSeRo at Technical University Bergakademie Freiberg Open Day

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Today we’ve had the honor to inform young high school students about the education possibilities of the Technical University Bergakademie Freiberg at their Open Day. In four hours I’ve learned howto explain everything about the aMoSeRo in a few sentences. Sadly we weren’t able to drive around because everything was very crowded, but we could demonstrate the 3D PointClouds a bit. So everybody was able to see the mathematics in infomatics by example 🙂

The only chance to take some photos had been before the day started, but here are some impressions:

first presentation of aMoSeRo at the BHT Freiberg Germany

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Today the BHT which is a mining research forum in Freiberg, Germany took place. As the amosero should run as a support robot in mining somewhen this has been a great chance to firstly show off what we’ve got so far. After 4 weeks from zero to robot:

So we were able to demonstrate the [amazon &title=Asus Xtion&text=Asus Xtion] Features like a live IR Image, some 1fps RGB DepthCloud visualized in RVIZ, driving around including to spot turn.

The plate cookie box we used had some negative effect on the wlan capacity, which we need to address soon by e.g. changing the material or excluding the antenna.

Had been a nice experience showing that little low cost ros robot to public an I am still very exited where the journey leads in the remaining 4 months of my thesis.

Virtual rearrangement of aMoSeRo One

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It’s still not easy finding the right combination and arrangement of all robot parts. Like mentioned in the previous post, SketchUp is a nice tool for easy 3D visualization using real physical dimensions. So I spend some time again:

So tomorrow I am trying to by the planned box and the new motors, hopefully posting real world photos soon.

Sketch him up!

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Today I am trying to setup all parts of the coming robot. Because assembling and disassembling would take hours until finding the right configuration and saving steps in between it would be impossible – I thought of a better way. Using my shopworn SketchUp skills and way more time than I expected – finally there is a non perfect but practicable model with the most important parts that are going to be installed. All of them already have the correct physical dimensions which also means that it would be possible to deploy the robot in rviz later, or at least parts of it.

Here are some early stage impressions:

CubiBot1

concept phase: iso view

The wireframe boxes are space required by usb plugs or power jacks. These need to be accessible and can’t be blocked by anything else.

This robot is not ready yet, everything needs to be rearranged and boxed soon. Some parts are still missing, and no cables are shown, so everything will be more packed than it looks like.

CubieTruck (CubieBoard 3) unboxing

The CubieTruck (or so called Cubieboard 3) is the third board of CubieTeam. It is a new PCB-Version with a Allwinner A20 Chip, which has also been used in the CubieBoard 2. But now there is more RAM (2GB) and onBoard VGA-graphics Controller, onBoard Wifi (!) and BLuetooth. There are some more features mentioned below, but for my project the main advantages are: more processing power (2 stronger cores), lower power consumption (500mAh at 5V), lots of GPIOs (2mm!) and flash memory.

So I unboxed one today:

It came with an android os flashed. So after some reading and kinda confusing tutorials I managed to get the correct version 13.04 of lubuntu server running on a sd card, installed ROS on it and was faced with some kind of paradies of ros hydro armhf packages!
Something I was really missing at the [amazon &title=Raspberry Pi&text=Raspberry Pi].

So after the first day of CubieBoard I am really looking forward to get this little fellow beeing the heart of my ROS Robot.

Features:

  • Allwinner Tech A20 SOC
  • SATA supported
  • 54 extended pins
  • Built-in HDMI/ VGA display interface
  • Built-in WIFI+BT module
  • 2GB DDR3 RAM
  • Built-in IR receiver
  • SPDIF audio interface

Specifications:

  • Allwinner Tech SOC A20 ARM® Cortex™-A7 Dual-Core ARM® Mali400 MP2 Complies with OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1
  • 2GB DDR3@480MHz
  • HDMI&VGA 1080P display output on-board
  • 10M/100M/1G Ethernet
  • WIFI + BT wireless connection with antenna on-board
  • SATA 2.0 interface support 2.5’ HDD (for 3.5’ HDD, only need another 12V power input)
  • Storage solution NAND + MicroSD
  • 2 x USB HOST, 1 x OTG, 1 x SPDIF, 1 x IR, 4 x LEDs, 1 x Headphone, 3 x Keys
  • Power DC5V@2.5A with HDD support Li-battery & RTC
  • 54 extended pins including I2S, I2C, SPI, CVBS, LRADC x2,UART, PS2, PWM x2, TS/CSI, IRDA, LINEIN&FMIN&MICIN, TVIN x4 with 2.0 pitch connectors
  • PCB size 11cm *8cm*1.4mm