Monday, December 31, 2007

Capaciflector

If you look at even relatively simple animals, like bumblebees, they are equipped with loads of complimentary sensors (vision, hearing, chemoreception, and touch). It seems to me the lofty goal of the robotics hobbyist to build a sizable robot that doesn't run into jutting coffee tables, moving cats, and other confounding domestic obstacles, let alone does anything remotely interesting, is to have a similar variety and multitude of sensors (not to mention being able to interpret all the signals).

Most robotics hobbyists know sensors react differently to different targets. The Cruiser's IR sensors can't detect a messy stack of papers or a bag of trash and it detects cardboard boxes about an inch farther away than semi-clear plastic boxes. Unless the cardboard is colored black. In information security, the key word is correlation: from multiple intrusion detectors in an intrusion detection system to determine if a hacker is up to no good. Clearly animals correlate their senses. The other night one of our cats was camped out on the bed next to me. I knew this because I could feel his warmth and the pressure of the sheet on my leg from his weight. I could move my leg and detect him. I never had to look.

The other thing in intrusion detection is you can't just stick one sensor on one computer host or network subnet. You have deploy sensors everywhere to see the whole picture or you will miss really important stuff. Surely the same is true in robotics? But the more sensors you add, the more cost, complexity, and required computing power you're dealing with (picture a robot with 10,000 IR detectors and driving circuitry). I was wondering if there was some simple, elegant, and economical way to use an electrostatic field to detect proximity.

Enter the capaciflector. Maybe everyone's heard of this but me. It was developed at Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA. A particularly attractive feature is the ability to use the robot's shell as the sensor(s) achieving an economy of purpose, and potentially giving the robot obstacle detection in essentially all directions and with whatever level of granularity you desire. I would think even a small robot with a basic microcontroller could gain a lot of perception without much processing cost. A few interesting tidbits on the capaciflector here. More articles on the subject here, here and here. Here's a capaciflector camera. But will this type of sensor work like I hope?

The big question is whether you can detect objects at any reasonable distance, say, 6 inches. For some reason the capaciflector reminds me of lateral lines on fish, but this is an active rather than passive sensor, and detects objects, not just living beings. Even if the distance is limited, this approach could provide another type of touch sense, like the hairs on our arms, and offer a last resort collision detection. Something, anything better than bumpers...

Have a happy and safe New Year!

Saturday, December 29, 2007

Obstacle Avoidance

Spent some time over the last couple of days programming obstacle avoidance into the Cruiser. (I really need a better name, any ideas?) So far what I've come up with isn't stellar but it works in most situations, though is kind of dumb sometimes, as you can see in the video. The bot is deciding what direction to turn and whether to do quarter turn or full turn based on whether the IR sensors are past a threshold. There's two pair in front, left, right, as well as two that point sort of rearwards (I'm ignoring those).



I'm sure it could be improved upon, but I want to try a couple of different experiments next. One involves using a neural network for obstacle avoidance (how will this work in an 8MHz 8-bit processor? I did some experimenting on a C64 back in the day and even using good ol' BASIC V2 it wasn't bad I guess).

Another experiment I'd love to try is navigating a maze corridor by steering to the middle between two walls. The eventual goal is maze solving and while we're at it, why not see how the little guy fares in a competition of some type, right? There's actually a competition in April... right when I'm planning to go four wheeling in Moab. But I'm getting a head of myself

Friday, December 28, 2007

Motor Control (Part 2)

Ok, well, if I get any of this wrong let me know. I haven't spent a lot of time in the AVR ATmega8 data sheets, and have only skimmed through this AVR PWM tutorial, but here goes...

Among the other things you can do, PWM-wise, you can create phase-correct PWM signals using a 16-bit counter, which is what the developer did who wrote the motor control example program (he said so in the comments). The long and short of it is that you use Timer1 (TCNT1), two Output Compare Registers (OCR1A and OCR1B). Two timer counter control registers (TCCR1A and TCCR1B) control TCNT1 and how the waveform generation operates.

The developer set TCCR1A to 0x0A2 (10100011). From the data sheet:
TCCR1B is set to 0x01. Here's the info on that from the data sheet:
So, the relevant settings being made are:

// Clear OC1A/B on Compare Match (set output low)
COM1A1 = 1; COM1A0 = 0;
COM1B1 = 1; COM1B0 = 0;

// Select clk/1 as source, no prescaling
CS12 = 0; CS11 = 0; CS10 = 1;

// Waveform Gen Mode 3, Phase-correct, 10-bit
WGM13 = 0; WGM12 = 0; WGM11 = 1; WGM10 = 1;

The data sheet gives you the truth tables for COM1B and WGM bits as they affect operation of the waveform generation. The example program's comments claimed it was setting Mode 2, Phase-corrected 9-bit but that is in contrast to the data sheet. Odd. At any rate, that takes care of the mode and configuration of the PWM.

Now, OCR1A and OCR1B are set to whatever desired value to achieve a particular duty cycle. Then TCNT1 is reset and off we go. The OCR1A/B registers are continually compared to TCNT1 and when there's a match, the corresponding Output Compare Pin (OC1A / PB1 and OC1B / PB2) is dropped low.
A lower compare value in OCR1A means more frequent drop-outs on the OC1A pin, thus a lower duty cycle, while a higher compare value means higher duty cycle. (At least that is how it works conceptually, but there are details I haven't tackled, yet)

In the example program (motor_test2.c) from Microrobot, the motor_init() function sets all this up (I've tweaked it a little to hopefully make more sense -- but take the comments with a grain of salt):

Distilling all this to the most fundamental information: to make the motors drive forward, basically do this after the init routine above:

OCR1AH=1; OCR1AL=100;
OCR1BH=1; OCR1BL=100;

The OC1A/B output pins go through the NAND gates mentioned previously and ultimately to input Pin1 and Pin2 of the Sanyo LB1630 bi-directional motor controller. It appears to always be the case that Pin1 = ~Pin2.
So how, exactly, do we get the motors to go reverse and forward simply by setting the high byte of OCR1A/B to 0x01... ?

I think we are always alternating between forward/reverse signals and we are essentially inverting the duty cycle for 0x00..0xFF (getting a reverse signal more often than a forward signal) versus 0x100..0x1FF (getting a forward signal more than a reverse signal). That means at 0x00, the motor is getting forward/reverse equally, which explains why the motors buzz at this setting. It also means we aren't saving a lot of energy by using PWM.

Also confusing is whether we are really using a 9- or 10-bit counter. Maybe I'll solve these mysteries in part 3.

Meanwhile I've managed to get the bot to do some very stupid, basic obstacle avoidance. So I am making some progress towards building a maze-solving bot.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Motor Control (Part 1)

I just did a little experimenting with the AVR, ATmega8-based Microrobot (MR) Cruiser. I wanted to get a better handle on motor control and unfortunately their sample programs have some flaws and their documentation is incomplete. Maybe this will help someone else out there.

The goal: accelerate the motors forward, then decelerate and stop. After that I wanted to reprogram to spin the robot counter-clockwise, then clockwise. Seems simple enough. Fortunately Microrobot provided some circuit diagrams so it's not too hard to figure out what needs to be done.

If you look at the diagram to the right, pin 14 of the AVR CPU represents bit 0 of PORT B (PB0) which corresponds to MOTOR_EN (Motor Enable). That's because it's wired to a set of NAND gates that control the motor driver.
One of the inputs to each of the NANDs is this motor enable bit, so turning it off (0) disables the motors. What does the code look like (in C, using WinAVR)? Well in MR's sample code they define some handy macros to enable/disable the motor (I've fixed their typo for ya):
What about direction & speed? As far as speed goes, the PB1/OC1A and PB2/OC1B pins (pins 15 and 16) are used to provide pulse width modulation (PWM) to the motors. But, details will have to wait... until I can decipher exactly how the PWM stuff works on AVR. It involves a combination of Output Compare Registers and Timer Control Registers to create the PWM waveform. More later...

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Christmas Robot!

Hope your holidays are going well! My sweet wife gave me a super cool programmable robot from Microrobot! I've already downloaded and run through the various test programs. Can't wait to tweak some code and get it to do something interesting.

It's got two interface boards; one for use with maze solving & obstacle avoidance, the other for line following. It's built around an Atmel AVR ATmega8L processor and uses dual Sanyo LB1630 motor controllers.

I'm new to the AVR world. Thus far all my embedded programming experience (I use the word "all" rather loosely...) has been on the Basic Stamp 2. Simple, easy to use, etc. But most of my plain old coding has been done on Unix using good ol' Emacs, C/gcc, etc., so perhaps it'll be a short learning curve... Here's what I've done so far: run a few test programs and gotten the bot to spin.


Saturday, December 22, 2007

Itsy Bitsy Spiderbot

BEAM Robotics is fundamentally about drawing inspiration from nature. I am thinking about what it would take to create a spider-like robot, using muscle wire to actuate music wire legs in a way that is similar to how a spider walks.

Then, of course, I got to fantasizing about a spider robot that could climb furniture, curtains, ... heck, walls too. Wouldn't that be cool? So then I thought to myself, "self, how do you suppose spiders can hang onto walls and whatever?" and so I brought up trusty Google and found out.

Spiders have a bunch of hairs on each foot, that branch out into finer hairs. Ultimately about 600,000 hairs per spider. These super-small hairs use the Van der Waals force of close proximity, electromagnetic attraction between atoms -- like some kind of atomic nano-Velcro.

So, all I have to do is create several hundred thousand ultra microscopic hairs and glue them one by one onto some kind of foot...

Friday, December 21, 2007

First Bot Thought

I've been interested in robots and robotics for at least 15 years now. Aside from a half-baked experiment or three, hundreds of ideas and drawings, and reading a bunch of books, I haven't managed to make the torture of earning that computer engineering degree truly worthwhile. (By entertaining friends and impressing family, of course).

Maybe that is all about to change. Once again, I've caught the bug--for robotic bugs, as in BEAM robotics. Something small scale. Simple. A project I might actually be able to complete. If nothing else, I've been having a lot of ideas about robotics lately. So I figured, why not foist them on the planet in the form of Yet Another Blog--er, I mean, share them you, gentle reader.

To get started, here's my first real robot. Store bought (not trying to cheat, trying to get inspired). For $10 you can get this simple, tiny hexapod walker from RadioShack. Features obstacle avoidance via wire antennas and it responds to loud noises. All in a package the size of a kiwi fruit.

Pretty exciting what technology has made possible in robotics. Can't wait to make my own...

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Edward Isaac Bot 3D!

Here's a 3-d ray-trace rendering of Ed the robot done years ago.

Sorry for the low res, but screen res wasn't so great back then.

To give you an idea, this was done on a Mac Centris 650... (running a Motorola 68040 at 25MHz)

The gold marker indicates ~ 2.5' height.

Edward Wheels

Edward Isaac Bot was to be a 2-3' multi-functional, useful, household robot. Good thing Paul and I weren't being ridiculously ambitious and were instead starting with a small, simple project. <- Sarcasm.

Here's some (simple) thoughts about wheel placement & size, and a later sketch of EIB overall shape. Basically, contemplating more forward wheel placement for stability, larger wheel size for more easily driving over small household obstacles. (Since this was written I got a Jeep and took up four-wheeling. Perhaps I can draw from some of my experiences in that realm).

The note about speed assumes a set of motors I'd already purchased, otherwise you could select wheel size & gearing for appropriate maximum speed.

Edward Isaac Bot: Sketchbook 1

Early sketches of Edward Isaac Bot, the concept Paul and I came up with years ago that got me into all this robot stuff.



(You can guess how old this is, given the cassette deck up front and four floppy drive bays in back...)

Monday, January 1, 2007

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