Robotics

Lets kick it off again!

Posted on by burf2000

So one of the only plus points of not getting any sleep due to the effects of the extreme diet for this bodybuilding show is insomnia, my mind gets very creative and forces me to start kicking off new ideas, projects, missions et!

So, if you saw my last post, I said I was gonna finish Hack24, fix Burf.co and sort the garage!   So far, Burf.co is back up, but about to completely change, the garage is nearly finished being geared up as a robotics lab and Hack24 has not moved.  I do want to finish hack24 but I don’t want to rush it and I want to harness my energy on some crazy robotics ideas while my brain still works 🙂

So the plan v2!  Warning it’s a little bonkers, even for me!

Build a backend set of machine learning API’s that Burf.co, mobile devices, and my robots use to send and retrieve data.  The idea is I could send it a question, a command or an image and it does some magic and responds.

  • So for mobile devices, they would send images and text to speech, it would return ImageNet classification or answers to questions.
  • Burf.co would become more of a knowledge base system using NLP to feed into other systems.
  • There would also be a public facing chatbot which would hopefully learn off of all of this.  Planning a system POC using AIML to test the waters
  • This would all somehow be also brought together to add some usefulness to my future robotics projects (image classification, knowledge base, etc)

I brought some odd bits of hardware, upgraded the Burf.co server, brought some domains, and started rewriting Burf.co in Java.  I decided I want to try and use a common language and randomly Java seemed the best fit (client, server, mobile etc)

It’s gonna be a slow progress but I think its gonna be exciting.

Let’s kick it all off!

Posted on by burf2000

Sorry for the last few months there has been little update. I decided that before I got too old I should enter a bodybuilding contest, honestly seemed like a good idea at the time. Well it’s been the hardest 3 months of my life to be honest. First off it isn’t the cheapest thing to do (I have spent £500 on chicken alone), you have to be super disciplined (up at 5, 1 hour cardio, training even if ill), you become very moody, tired and even get insomnia (writing this at 3am) because your constantly hungry! However with less than 2 weeks to go, I am still chuffed I decided to do it. On a positive side, because you don’t sleep as much, your brain seems to be come very creative!!!

So what’s the plan Batman?

So, I have many plans, lots of ideas and have been researching lots of stuff but I need to do some house keeping first!

1) Release a v1 of Hack24 cross platform to prove the framework works.

2) Fix Burf.co Search Engine because I turned it off.

3) Finish the garage so that large projects are possible 🙂

All of the above are in progress and I hope to have them done very soon. Then it is full speed ahead for some cool robotics / machine learning project that I will discuss in my next post 🙂

VEX Worlds 2017 – Robotics Competition

Posted on by burf2000

Sorry for the late post about VEX Worlds, I thought I would have more time after worlds to catch up with stuff, sadly (well not really), the kids have been mega active.  My eldest son played his first football tournament, had a holiday, lots of family stuff!

So, VEX Worlds, what an amazing experience, I went along for the VEX EDR side of the competition (this year it was split EDR / IQ) as I was showing off the EDR Tank.  Sadly I had to leave the US early as my son, Max was ill.  Still a very cool experience!

So, the EDR tank, well it performed really really well in remote control mode.  I mean the thing was fairly slow but must have covered MILES!  The batteries never died on me, nor did any motors!  I did kill a few Omniwheels, however, that’s to be expected.   Even though I left early, the EDR tank did not and so others drove it around.  I have not received it back yet to see how bad it is now, but I am sure it will be fine.

The autonomous side was a bit of a failure, to be honest, and looking back I had set up myself to fail and I will explain why.  The autonomous side was using ROS (Robotic operating system) which is an industry standard.  I was using a Neato Lidar system which is awesome however it only had a range of 5 meters and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) to work out where I was, and where I needed to go via building up a map.  SLAM works by detecting features of the surrounding area to work out where it is.  When you’re in a hall that’s hundreds of meters wide with very little features, a sensor with a range of 5 meters is practically useless.  In the end, I just showed kids how it worked on my laptop using RVIZ.  If I had to do this properly I would need to invest in a proper LIDAR system with a much greater range.  Another aspect which makes this very hard is all the people moving around, how can SLAM pick up features if they are constantly moving!

Overall, the EDR tank was hugely popular, I gave tons of fist bumps, high fives, etc, people just thought it was cool, just a little slow.

Next year, if I did a vehicle again, I would have to make it a lot faster and forget about advance sensors etc!

Here are some videos of VEX World and the EDR TANK:

The VEX EDR Tank

Posted on by burf2000

Over the last few month’s, I have been building a vehicle out of VEX EDR with the aim of it to self-drive. This is my first big project with VEX EDR, I usually build large stuff out of LEGO Mindstorms or VEXIQ. My view was that VEX EDR would be easier as it is a) made out of metal as opposed to plastic, and b) more powerful. I thought it would take me a week to make the vehicle, and the rest of the time would be on software. I had to also learn ROS (Robotic Operating System).

It actually turned out more challenging than I expected. Due to my lack of experience with EDR, I just assumed metal would just be stronger, and the motors would just work. However the first version of the Tank collapsed under my weight, and it took around 10 versions to get it to move me (95kg) without the motors shutting down after 5 seconds. Unlike LEGO and VEXIQ, EDR motors had a protection circuit in (PTC) which shut down the motor if it gets too hot or draws too much power. This is, of course, a good feature to protect the motor, however, it made my project very difficult.

I went from 8 motors, direct drive to 14 motors geared down to 2.44. The 8 motors could move me at a rapid speed but would just shut down after a few second.

Here is the progress of how it went

Current state

So I managed to get the Tank to a point where it worked, it was not as fast as I hoped however it seems reliable.  Next is the software.  ROS is a big subject to learn, there are lot of books on it and it is not the easiest thing to learn.  I have actually made some good progress on this thanks to the community.  Stay tuned to my next post about ROS.

 

 

Mr Purple : VEX SMART RADIO : VEX WORLD FINALS 2016

Posted on by burf2000

So, the first part of this year, I have been swamped with VEX stuff to do, it’s been pretty good fun actually.  I now have lot’s of VEX EDR (the metal stuff) to play with.  Very excited about that!  I have also been invited to VEX World Finals in the US!  The aim is to build some smartphone controlled robots that show off the power of the Smart Radio. Thanks to Xander and RobotC it is now possible to do 2 way communication between VEXIQ and iOS

Code is here! https://github.com/burf2000/VEXIQ_iOS_ROBOTC

Anyway, so MR PURPLE, I went in to the garage, I came out with MR PURPLE.  3  DOF per arm and his head moves!  Super happy with him

2016-03-26 16.09.13

2016-03-26 15.40.46 2016-03-26 15.00.47 2016-03-26 14.58.47 2016-03-26 14.08.56

 

VEX and the Big Bang Science Fair

Posted on by burf2000

So I have been asked by VEX Robotics to build 2 small robotics for Big Bang Science show at the NEC.  The 2 robotics will be on stage as helpers.  It’s a super fun idea, focus is reliability!  The robots need telescopic arms to push buttons and be able to push out a bottle of water from their chests.

Here are 2 initial videos I did showing progression

I actually got to see the robots on stage and they worked perfectly!

What I enjoyed about this was trying to make VEX stuff look cool, it’s actually harder than it is with LEGO 🙂

 

 

VEX Robotics

Posted on by burf2000

So I have been very lucky and been sent some VEX IQ Robotics sets including the HEXBUG 4-1 Set to have a play with.  Here are a couple of videos I have done on VEX

I have really enjoyed messing around with VEX and hope to continue using it.  I have plans to do my usual and build something huge using VEX IQ and compare it to LEGO MINDSTORMS.  It will be very interesting to see how it compares.