History: BrainEngineering BrainBot

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BrainBot is a project directed and funded by the [http://www.brainengineering.com|Brain Engineering Laboratory] and [http://www.dartmouth.edu/~neukom/|Neukom Institute] at [http://www.dartmouth.edu|Dartmouth College], designed in collaboration with Jon Hylands and [http://www.huv.com|HUV Inc.], whose purpose is to enable the study and practice of brain engineering.

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March 2, 2009 - BrainBot is moving forwards! [http://www.huv.com/blog/2009/02/big-changes.html|HUV now has a full-time contract] to work on BrainBot...

Cool things are coming...

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One of the things we're trying to do is build demos of BrainBot doing interesting tasks. We're doing this to show that the hardware platform is capable, and thus is worth writing extensive software for. The easiest way to control a platform like BrainBot at this stage is remote control. However, controlling arms and grippers using a joystick doesn't work very well for performing complex tasks.

One of the researchers at the Brain Engineering Lab came up with the idea of "voodoo control", which basically involves manipulating a second BrainBot robot to control the first one. You move the arm of one robot, and the other robot's arm moves in the exact same fashion. In the above video, the tracked-base BrainBot is fully wireless, running off battery and with the bus communications done through wifi. The second robot is connected directly to a USB port of my PC.

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The above movie shows BrainBot with a tracked base, running with wifi control through the onboard gumstix verdex.

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BrainBot currently weighs in at just about 3.0 kg, with both cameras on and both batteries installed.

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This is the gripper, temporarily mounted with the current printed gear (I'm waiting for the proper sized ones to arrive).

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Here's the chest, with the gumstix verdex (attached on an Audiostix2) mounted, and the main USB pcb mounted as well. You can see the IMU down below, between the hip servos.

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This is what it looks like from the back:

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Here's the main circuit board, with the USB interface chips, the bus headers, the two power connectors, a couple fuses, and the power connections for the cameras and the gumstix. As well, there are a couple connections for the switching board shown below.

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This image shows the main power switching board. The three switches are for (left to right) main bus power, camera power, and gumstix power.

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Here we have the batteries sitting in place, since the mounts are now completed. There are two battery packs, each of which is a 9.6 volt, 8-cell NiMh pack (made with AA cells).

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And this is the view from the front, with the batteries installed. Lots of space in there for the electronics.

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This image shows the two side panels, CNC cut and drilled from 1/8" Delrin plate. The servo mounts work really well, and hold the servos very securely with 6 machine screws.

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This is the chest compartment, put together. Two servos are mounted in place - they are the shoulder rotator servos.

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And finally, with the top and bottom mounts build, a big chunk of the robot can be put together now. The body has changed some from the original design - the wifi module we bought doesn't seem to work, so we're switching to using the new gumstix verdex, which has host USB capabilities, and thus can talk to the Bioloid bus using a USB chip, and can talk to either a native-mode wifi module, or a USB wifi module.

The servo at the top, sticking up, is the camera tilt servo, mounted on top of the camera pan servo. The chest is a little wider than the standard Bioloid chest to allow enough room for the pan servo to sit inside, between the shoulder servos.

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Here's a picture showing the inside of the chest compartment, with the five servos. The two battery packs go in back, and the gumstix will be across the front. The IMU and the support board will go in between the hip servos.

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This robot will be controlled using a PC through an [http://www.bioloid.info/tiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1&page=1|802.11b wireless connection]. It will use a pair of wireless cameras for stereo vision on a pan and tilt head, and it will have a custom made chest enclosure made from laser-cut polycarbonate. It will also have grippers on each hand, with each gripper having a rotating wrist, touch sensor, and grasping abilities. Each gripper will simply be an actuator/sensor on the Bioloid serial bus, and thus will be controllable like all the other servos on the robot.

Inside the chest cavity, in addition to the electronics package, is a 6-axis IMU which can either be wireless through bluetooth, or attached to the Bioloid bus.

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