Autonomous Walk

Published on 2015-01-06 in Pico-Kubik quadruped robot.

Camera and battery problems aside, I finally got this little fellow to walk on its own, without a cable connecting it to the computer. It still uses the serial interface to talk with an Arduino Pro Mini, which is its spinal cord, but this time the signal comes from the VoCore board mounted under its belly.

As you can see, it’s far from perfect. There are a lot of spasms, which I suspect come from noise on the serial line (although they are suspiciously regular). I will try lowering the baud rate of the connection next, to see if that goes away.

I also have some progress on the camera front. Turns out that an older version of mjpeg-streamer doesn’t segfault in the YUV mode, so I’m going to use that. Unfortunately, the battery accident left me without a working camera, so I’m waiting for a new batch of them to arrive (I get them cheap from junk laptops). In the mean time I made a proper plug for the camera module, so that, hopefully, I will break fewer.\