Still Alive

Published on 2015-02-13 in Pico-Kubik quadruped robot.

The progress on this guy has been kind of slow, and mostly in software. The current status is that I have the video streaming from camera to the web browser working, and I resolved the issue with noise on the serial line that made it impossible for the robot to walk properly (it turned out to be some kernel logs still being output to the serial). There still seems to be some problem either with the leg inverse kinematics, or the walking algorithm, as the legs move a little strange – this requires further investigation.

I also have no idea for the control scheme. Right now I just start the micropython script from the command line over ssh, but it would be nice to be able to control the robot interactively, possibly through the web page that includes the streamed video. There is a socket library in micropython, so I could just listen for commands on some port, but from JavaScript I can only do HTTP or websocket communication… I need to think about it some more.

As for the twin brother, I’m trying to program it entirely in Arduino, so that it’s the cheapest quadruped robot around. If that works, I will add a basic “laser tag” gun to it and try to talk some friends into making their own version, so that we can have a cheap version of the Mech Warfare battles. It will probably be a separate project, though.\