Category Archives: Robots

Building a Junk Rover (Part 2)

Introduction

The Junkbote Rover

In the last article, we posted about how the Junkbot rover was built and what went into its initial construction. Since that post was written, the robot has been completed and it is now does everything it was designed to do and a little bit more.

This article will describe what has been added and changed. It then also discusses what additional things could be added or changed in the future, or included in any new robot projects. (Watch this space!)

The Junkbot appeared at the recent Science Alive 2019, at the Port Adelaide Enfield diplay, and while there, was driven around remotely, making friends with the visitors.

Completing the Build

There have been some minor changes and additionss to the robot as seen in the picture above. Cosmetically, the green button in the middle of his ‘head’ has been replaced with a red numerical display that shows the battery voltage. The black speakers (USB) below this have been replace with a larger box containing USB powered/amplified speakers that take their audio from a line-in (line-out from the Raspberry Pi computer) which are louder and are more reliable. The original USB based audio speakers would periodically just stop working.

On the side of the top grey box, a pair of sero motors have been added, one on each side. The customer will be able to add what every they want to these. These were wired to the Raspberry Pi PWN board, and can be controlled to go up and down independantly.

Driving the Robot

As mentioned in the previous article, the computer controlling the robot is a Raspberry Pi 3, running with a custom Python program which uses keybaord input to then drive the various motors and servos on the robot. The operating system bering used is Raspbian, which has a graphical desktop, similar to MS Windows or Apple iOS, but instead of displaying oit on a screen, can be shown on another computer on the network, via a program called VNC. This easily allows someone sitting at a computer screen, possibly at a long remote distance, to see what the rovers computer sees, and control it in exactly the same way as if they were sitting next to it (as if it had a screen, keyboard and mouse attached).

When running the driving software, pressing keys on the keyboard (‘w’,’a’,’s’ and ‘d’) will make the robot drive forward, left, backwards, and right. Other keys will make it move its servos up and down, as well as completely stop.

Webcam software displays the camera image, so the driver can see where they are going.

In addition, by using some standard video conferencing software (Google) , the robots speakers and microphone can be used to hold conversations with people near the rover. Voice changing software on the call add additonal interest, giving the robot even more personality.

Improvements, Upgrades and Future Plans

The rover uses the Raspberry Pi 3 computer. An immediate improvement to performance, if required, is to upgrade this to a Raspberry Pi 4, with larger memory. The board can be resonably easily swapped out, and running the new board from the existing SDcard.

The Raspbian operating system, which is based on Debian, made the task of developing the driving software, and integrating it with other standard software packages (audio, video, remote desktop etc) very easy to do. Little, if any, changes neede dto be made to get the various software packages to work together. It almost felt like cheating. If there is any other requirement for the rover (eg. adding USB Scanner) then adding this aught to be straight forward, particularly it already exists on a general purpose linux desktop system. Raspian has also been configured to work on the small Raspberry Pi, which avoids a lot of possible finiky problems with system settings that may not be suitable on a resource constrained system.

Much of the other robot software systems out there are specifically written with particular robot hardware platforms in mind, and run on predefined operating systems. An example of a Open Source option is ROS (Robot Operating System and ROS2), but these only run on particular versions of Ubuntu. It would be interesting to use ROS2, as it allows greater flexibility in how the robot can be operated, including tracking and autonomous driving modes, as well as a bunch of other robot options. The learning curve is also quite steep.

Os menioned, the driving softwareis keyboard based. It could be replaced with a graphical tool, maybe also written in Python (Qt4Py). The keyboard events could still be captured and used, but the display could be use to provide more information and create an easier way to operate the rover, An example of this migh tbe a more intuative display of the of motor tuning parameters used to drive of the motors. Getting the rover to drive straight was always little bit tricky.

Along the lines of hardware improvements and additional sensors, shaft rotation sensors could be added to the wheels to get better motion/position sensing, or accellerometer and gyro sensors. It is possible to add an Xbox Kinect sensor bar as a distance sensing camera, which would be useful if driving in an area where people might be moving.

Building a Junk Rover

Another project for 2019! I am helping build robot rover with a “junk” theme (eg.make from e-waste) for use in school education program about recycling and reuse of electronic waste.

This is being done as part of my involvement as a volunteer with Port Adelaide Enfield Libraries and their STEM Program.

Robert has built the hardware which consists of a chassis made of old computer boards. The eyes are recycled IP security cameras which no longer work. The video is coming from a webcam, and the mouth is the usual set of stereo speakers sold for use with the Raspberry Pi computer. To control the motors and other moving parts, the Junkbot uses a small Raspberry Pi computer and a 16 Channel PWM PiHat from Core Electronics.

All of this work has been done with the aim of releasing everything under Free and Open licenses (both hardware designs and software). It would be great if the project reached a point where we not only made something useful for the STEM program but that others could use as a base for their own projects. (If any of this is useful to you, please let me know.)

All of the code from this project is available at Github.

The robot is running ‘Raspbian’ on the Raspberry Pi with the Python Libraries from Core Electronics to enable the wheel motors ans servos to be crontrolled via Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) and the attached PWM board.

For better or worse it was decided to create a keyboard control interface to drive the robot. The desktop screen of the Raspberry Pi is exported over Wifi and the internet via VNC, which can be accessed via VNCviewer. Using keyboard controls we can drive the robot motors, which also allowed us to then tune it’s operation.

As an initial observation, smooth driving operation of the robot might sound like a good idea but it appears as though with remote camera access, control is better if the robot makes small moves, allowing the video display to catch up.

Tuning, modifications and upgrades continue.

More about the construction

From Robert Hart on the electronics…

Inside the head of the Junkbot

The robot will run on a S3 Lipo (on the left in the picture above). Its nominal voltage of 11.1V (3.70V*3 cells) and a fully charged 3S pack is 12.60V and a fully discharged 3S pack is 9.00V. I have incorporated two 5V buck (voltage) convertors: 5A for the Raspberry Pi and 3A for the Servo Hat. The two motors are driven using two Electronic Speed Controllers (ESC)

Waterproof Electronic Speed Controller

The ESCs have had the fans are removed and the on/off switchs have been removed and shorted. The servo lead has also had its postive wire open circuited so not to feed its 5V rail back into the Servo hat.

The Rasperry Pi and Servo Hat can be seen to the right of the box. The ESC’s are above that, with the two voltage converters at the bottom.

Edison Robots

I have just been introduced to the Edison Robots.  I was shown a box of them that are going to be used to teach programming(coding) and robotics in a local primary school. They looked vaguely familiar.

The company behind the Edison is Microbric and they have been around for a while. They concluded an Kickstarter campaign in 2014, raising over $100,000. Somehow I missed this campaign at the time, but they managed to raise enough to create a ‘block based’ programming environment for the robots what will run in a browser, Windows, iOS, Android and Linux (including on the Raspberry Pi).

I had to delve a little deeper on the programming side though. I had dealt with the original Microbric robots, which could have a programming cable attached, but weren’t really programmable. They came with some pre-programmed actions, like ‘follow the line’, as well as playing the theme songs of the local AFL Football teams. The way these programs were selected was also novel. They could be made to run over and read a barcode which was read by a light sensor. It was also possible to hold them up to a computer screen, but this was a little bit unreliable. A the time I tried to manually decode the barcodes, but without success. There was a programming cable available (based on a Nokia phone cable) but it’s use was unsupported at the time I was looking at it. I don’t know if this ever changed.

On the other hand, programming the Edison with the Edware software is a great addition and a great introduction to robotic programming for students. The software is Python based under the hood, is available under a Free and Open Source license (GPLv2) and is available on Github.

Some things I would like to try with the Edison:

  • Attach a pen and get the robot to write a message, or draw a picture.
  • Build a robot arm that can move chess pieces.

One interesting application can be found here: Chocolate Rotomolding Machine (YouTube).

The MeetEdison website recommends the following Lego Kit – 42032 Compact Tracked Loader – as a good way of getting parts useful for building more advanced robots and machines. Details are in the EdBook3.