9 Jan 2012

Inverse Kinematics And Trigonometry Basics




So firstly, why do we need kinematics? What are they?

Motivation

With your robot having legs the position of those legs dictates where its feet are. Where its feet are dictate its point of balance.

As you undoubtedly know balance can be defined as the robot's centre of mass (affectionately referred to as its centre of gravity) being between its centre of pivots (i.e. the edges of where its feet contact the ground).

If the centre of mass is above the centre of pivots and between them the robot will balance (almost an unstable equilibrium, if you're an applied mathemetician).

If the centre of mass is above but outside the centre of pivots (i.e. beyond the edges of his feet) the robot will overbalance and fall. Fast.




2 Jan 2012

Control Arduino Through Serial Connection (USB) VB Visual Basic program

Content Has been moved to my new blog


http://blog.oscarliang.net/control-arduino-through-serial-connection-usb-vb-visual-basic-program/





LED Example:




Hexapod Example:


Why?

When we are debugging and testing our circuits and codings, most of the times we reset the Arduino board and upload the new program. But the thing is everything has a finite lifetime, and by doing harmful things to the body would even reduce life quicker. 

Just like smoking could kill you, repetitively uploading could kill your arduino too! I still remember I read from somewhere, and someone said an Arduino board has an average uploading limit of about 1000 times... I don't know if this is true, but if we could avoid doing something that could harm the arduino, then why not?

So here we are, I was looking for a way to test and develop new moves and gaits for my hexapod robot. But frequently uploading new codes really cost me time and risking killing the arduino, so I thought it would be nice to test it just by sending the arduino a command through USB connection (Serial communication), therefore the possibility of program uploading could be minimized.

This is also useful when we use bluetooth to control arduino.


1 Jan 2012

Hexapod Robot with 2 DOF legs (degree of freedom)

First Motion, Legs flexibility:


stalker is dead... but the body and components are preserved well, so I decided to reuse them and therefore Mini is born.


Lastest update (12/01/2012)