When Alessandro Giacomel discovered Arduino in 2009, he quickly became hooked. Since then, he’s been designing “little robots” around Ardunio and blogging about his work and findings. In this interview, Alessandro tells us about his most interesting projects and shares his thoughts on the future of robotics, 3-D printing, and more.
CIRCUIT CELLAR: How long have you been designing embedded systems and what sparked your interest
ALESSANDRO: I have been designing embedded systems for about five years. My interest arose from the possibility of building robots. When I was a kid, I found robots extremely fascinating. The ability to force matter to do something we decided always seemed to be one of the main goals conceded to man.
CIRCUIT CELLAR: Tell us about your first design.
ALESSANDRO: My first embedded system was an Arduino 2009. The availability of a huge shield, sensors, and actuators has enabled me to design many applications at an acceptable price for an amateur like me.
Alessandro’s first robot
I started like many people, with a robot on wheels moving around avoiding obstacles. It’s a standard robot that almost all beginners build. It’s simple because it is built with only a few components and a standard Arduino 2009. The design included modified servomotors that can rotate 360° moving the robot and connected to the wheels and a servomotor to move a little head where there is an ultrasonic distance sensor. The distance sensor lets you know when the robot is in front of an obstacle and helps you decide the most convenient way for the robot to escape.
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—Advertise Here—In its simplicity, this robot enables one to understand the basics for the development of a microcontroller-based robot: the need to have separate power supplies for the motors’ power circuits and for the microcontroller’s logic, the need to have precise sensor reading timing, and the importance of having efficient algorithms to ensure that the robot moves in the desired mode.
My first robot took me a long time to build. But all the elements of the robot (hardware and software) were developed by me and this was important because it let me begin to face the real problems that arise when you are building a robot. Today there are many resources on the Internet that enable one to build a robot simply replicating a set of steps anyone has described. These guides should be used as a source of inspiration, never followed exactly step-by-step, otherwise—while in the end it is true that you can build a robot—you don’t own the knowledge of what has been done.
My robot evolved with the ability to speak, thanks to a sound module. When I build a robot the goal is always to experiment with a technology and to have fun. My friends have enjoyed seeing the robot turning around, speaking, and telling funny stories.
CIRCUIT CELLAR: Your blog, Robottini (http://robottini.altervista.org), is described as “little robots with Arduino.” What inspired you to begin the blog
ALESSANDRO: I strongly believe in sharing knowledge and open-source hardware and software. I thought it was normal to try to share what I was designing when I started to build robots. When I started, I had the benefit of what others had made and published on the Internet. I thought about writing a blog in my language, Italian, but I thought also it would be a good exercise for me to try to write in English and, most importantly, this enabled me to reach a much wider audience.
The site description includes the philosophy at the basis of the blog: small robots built using Arduino. I build small robots because I’m an amateur and my house isn’t very big, so I only build robots that I can put in an armoire. I use Arduino because it is a microcontroller developed in Italy, it was obvious for me to use it, and it is really a great board for a beginner—inexpensive and robust.
Alessandro’s first robot at the Arduino Day 2011 event
The community has developed thousands of applications that can be reused. When I started the blog in 2011, I was building small robots for a few years. In the beginning, finding information was much more complicated and there were few shields that were not cheap. So, I always tried to use “poor” materials (e.g., recovered or recycled). Decreasing the cost of implementation and reusing and imagining new purposes for the things already available in a normal house seemed like a good way to work.
My achievements documented in the blog are never step-by-step guides to build the robot. I include a list of components to buy, the source code, and sometimes the wiring diagram. But I never provide a complete guide, since I think everyone should try to build their own robot because, once built, the satisfaction is enormous.
Through my blog I am available to help with problems people encounter when they are building robots, but I think it is important to give people the tools to build, rather than providing detailed explanations. Everyone can learn only by fighting the difficulties, without having someone preparing everything perfectly.
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—Advertise Here—CIRCUIT CELLAR: Robottini obviously includes quite a few robotics projects. Why did you build them? Do you have a favorite?
ALESSANDRO: Many times people ask me what is the meaning of the robots I build. The answer that I give them leaves people puzzled. The answer is this: My robots are useless. They are useful only as fun—as a passion. I’m happy when I see my little son, Stefano, who is three years old, watching and laughing at a robot turning around in our house. But this does not mean I don’t follow a branch of research when I build robots.
Initially, I built robots to understand how the driver for the motors works, the sensors, and the problems related to the logic of the robot. Afterward, the first branch of research was the issue of control, how to set the proportional, integral, derivative (PID) control to follow a line or make a robot that is in balance. This has enabled me to address the management of complex sensors, such as the inertial measurement unit (IMU).
To have a robot balance on two wheels it is important to measure how much the robot is tilting from the vertical. To do this, typically a cluster of sensors is used, called IMU, which are based on multi-axes combinations of precision gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers, and pressure sensors. In a more simple version, the IMU uses an accelerometer and a gyroscope, and it is mandatory to use both signals to obtain a correct value of the tilt angle from the vertical (it is called fusion of signals).
The most common method used is based on the Kalman filter, which is a mathematical tool that enables you to combine two or more signals to obtain the value of the angle. But it is a highly sophisticated and difficult for an amateur to understand, and it requires fairly advanced knowledge of mathematics. A new method that is rather simple has been proposed in the last years. It is called the “complementary filter.“
One of the studies I performed and posted on my blog compares in practice the signals of the two filters to verify if the complementary filter is able to approximate the Kalman filter in typical situations coming up in robotics. This post has had a great following, and I’ve been surprised to see that several university-level scientific publications have linked to it. I only wrote the post because I was curious to see a simple and almost trivial method that has become helpful to researchers and hobbyists. It has been a pleasure for me.
In the last year, I have followed the trend of art and interaction (i.e., the possibility of building something that can somehow marry art with technology). It was the theme of the stall I had at Maker Faire Europe in Rome, Italy, in October 2013. Arduino is an electronic circuit without a heart and without a soul. Can an Arduino be an artist? I’m trying to do something with Arduino that could be “art.” The arts include painting, poetry, music, sculpture, and so on. I’m trying to do something in different fields of art.
My first experiment is the Dadaist Poetry Box, which is a box capable of composing and printing Dadaist poems. It’s made with an Arduino and uses a printer for receipts to write poems. The box uses an algorithm to compose the poems in autonomy. You push the button and here is your Dadaist poem.
Dadaist poetry box design
Normally, the poem is a valuable asset, the result of an intimate moment when the poet transposes on paper the emotions of his soul. It is an inspired act, an act of concentration and transport. It’s not immediate. The poem box instead is trivial, it seems almost “anti-poem.” But it’s not; it’s a Dadaist poem. A user can push the button and have an original poem. I like the machine because it gives everyone something material to take home. In this way, the experience of interaction with the machine goes beyond the moment.
Another of my favorite robots is one that is capable of drawing portraits. I’ve never been good at drawing, and I’ve always been envious of those who can easily use a pencil to make a portrait. So I tried using my technical skills to fill this gap.
Portrait-drawing robot
The search of the algorithm that—starting from a picture—is able to detect the most important lines of the face has been particularly long and difficult. I used the OpenCV open-source libraries for computer vision and image processing, which are very powerful, but hard to handle. Installing the libraries is not a simple undertaking and using them is even more complicated. I used the OpenCV for Processing. Processing is an open-source programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching the fundamentals of computer programming in a visual context.
The algorithm initially found facial lines using the algorithms for calculation of edges of a picture. So I used the Canny edge detector, the Sobel edge detector, and all the other main edge detection algorithms, but none of these proved to be adequate to draw a face. Then I changed the course and used the Laplacian filter with threshold. I think I reached a good result because it takes less than 10 minutes to draw a portrait, which enables me to take pictures of people and make their portrait before they lose their patience.
CIRCUIT CELLAR: What new technologies excite you and why?
ALESSANDRO: I work almost strictly with Arduino microcontrollers. I was excited with the arrival of Linux-embedded mini-PCs (e.g., the Raspberry PI, the pcDuino, and BeagleBoard.org’s BeagleBone Black). Forcibly, I’m very intrigued by the new Arduino Tre, which is a mini-PC with Linux joined with an Arduino Leonardo. Combining a PC’s processing power of with Linux with the real-time management of the sensors and actuators made by an Arduino is an interesting road. It offers the possibility to manage the real-time processing of video streams through, for example, the OpenCV libraries, with the option of acquiring signals from analog sensors and the possibility of drive motors. For example, this enables one to have a completely autonomous 3-D printer and to perform the slicing and management of the 3-D printer. It also opens up new perspectives in the robotics and computer vision. The main limitation, which is now present in embedded systems, is the limited processing capacity. The ability to have in the same card a Linux system—with the world of applications and drivers already available—linked to the ability to manage physical devices brings a revolution. And I’m already excited to see the next results.
Read the complete interview in Circuit Cellar 292 November 2014.
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Circuit Cellar's editorial team comprises professional engineers, technical editors, and digital media specialists. You can reach the Editorial Department at editorial@circuitcellar.com, @circuitcellar, and facebook.com/circuitcellar
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