Aerial Robot Demonstration Wows at TEDTalk

Posted on 2012/03/02 by C. J. Abate

In a TEDTalk Thursday, engineer Vijay Kumar presented an exciting innovation in the field of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology. He detailed how a team of UPenn engineers retrofitted compact aerial robots with embedded technologies that enable them to swarm and operate as a team to take on a variety of remarkable tasks. A swarm can complete construction projects, orchestrate a nine-instrument piece of music, and much more.

The 0.1-lb aerial robot Kumar presented on stage—built by UPenn students Alex Kushleyev and Daniel Mellinger—consumed approximately 15 W, he said. The 8-inch design—which can operate outdoors or indoors without GPS—featured onboard accelerometers, gyros, and processors.

“An on-board processor essentially looks at what motions need to be executed, and combines these motions, and figures out what commands to send to the motors 600 times a second,” Kumar said.

Watch the video for the entire talk and demonstration. Nine aerial robots play six instruments at the 14:49 minute mark.

Interview: Hanno Sander on Robotics

Posted on 2012/02/26 by C. J. Abate

I met Hanno Sander in 2008 at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, CA. At the time, Hanno was at the Parallax booth demonstrating a Propeller-based, two-wheeled balancing robot. Several months later, we published an article he wrote about the project in issue March 2009. Today, Hanno runs HannoWare and works with school systems to improve youth education by focusing technological innovation in classrooms.

Hanno Sander at Work

The March issue of Circuit Cellar, which will hit newsstands soon, features an in-depth interview with Hanno. It’s an inspirational story for experienced and novice roboticists alike.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

HannoWare is my attempt to share my hobbies with others while keeping my kids fed and wife happy. It started with me simply selling software online but is now a business developing and selling software, hardware, and courseware directly and through distributors. I get a kick out of collaborating with top engineers on our projects and love hearing from customers about their success.

Our first product was the ViewPort development environment for the Parallax Propeller, which features both traditional tools like line-by-line stepping and breakpoints as well as real-time graphs of variables and pin I/O states to help developers debug their firmware. ViewPort has been used for applications ranging from creating a hobby Turing machine to calibrating a resolver for a 6-MW motor. 12Blocks is a visual programming language for hobby microcontrollers.

The drag-n-drop style of programming with customizable blocks makes it ideal for novice programmers. Like ViewPort, 12Blocks uses rich graphics to help programmers understand what’s going on inside the processor.

The ability to view and edit the underlying sourcecode simplifies transition to text languages like BASIC and C when appropriate. TBot is the result of an Internetonly collaboration with Chad George, a very talented roboticist. Our goal for the robot was to excel at typical robot challenges in its stock configuration while also allowing users to customize the platform to their needs. A full set of sensors and actuators accomplish the former while the metal frame, expansion ports, and software libraries satisfy the latter.

Click here to read the entire interview.

DIY MCU-Based Balancing Robot System

Posted on 2012/02/07 by C. J. Abate

Want a balancing robot? With the right microcontroller and a little planning, you can build one yourself. This system’s designers—Nghia Tran, Victor Tran, Tammy Tran, Andy Tran, and Trucmai Nguyen—used a Texas Instruments LM3S9B96. After gyro and accelerometer data are read and processed, a balancing algorithm is performed and output is sent out to the left and right motors. A wireless adapter and network enables users to remotely control the robot.

MCU-Based Balancing Bot

The designers provided the following information about the project:

The EK-LM3S9B96 uses PWM0, PWM1, and PWM2, PWM3 peripheral to control to the left and right motor drivers, respectively.
Quadrature encoder input 0 (QEI0) and Quadrature encoder input 1 (QEI1) are used for reading the left and right motors’ encoder feedback.
SSI1 is configured to function as a master SPI for the inertial measurement unit IMU interface. The designers used an Analog Devices ADIS16350.
The Ethernet controller embedded on the LM3S9B96 connects to a wireless adaptor.
UART0 is for debug and JTAG is for programming.
A user can set the PWM values to the motor driver. The PWM value range is: –32000 to 32000
The balance control is also a PID control loop with torque output and tilt angle feedback

Block diagram of the LM3S9B96-based balancing robot

Click here to study the entire project.