End Effector Design

Brain storming

Engineers facing the world ...

Engineers believe they can fix everything and in case of failure, they are humble enough to accept carry the guilt personally and mention that it is them who can not solve the challenge, but a challenge always has a solution :-)

I like to be an engineer ;-)

Climbing patterns

Fast climbing with degrees from 0 - 360 degrees

Slow climbing with either upwards and downwards, or right and left

The combination of these two types of climbing can give a combination of very fast climbing plus precise climbing when needed. Also fast climbing method gives robot the chance to move to directions from 0 - 360 degrees.

Bluetooth Technology

Bluetooth uses very little energy !!! They are used in Tsunami detectors (ZIGBEE tech) ...

Advantages	Disadvantages
High throughput	Device discovery is slow in term of power usage and time
Resilience against interference	Keeping connections open is expensive in term of power usage
????????	??????????

Infrared Technology

Using Infrared for connecting micro-controllers is one of the available choices of wireless intercommunication between micro-controllers. Here is a short list of challenges and the benefits that using such technology would provide us :
Advantages

• Very low power requirement, hence it is best suitable for machinery with limited battery capacity, like mobile robots, laptops, pads, phones, etc.
• Inexpensive -> Not a very important issue in designing a revolutionary system. The redundancy is the most important feature.
• Very secure. The data flow among the source and target is unidirectional, meaning the direction of the infrared beam ensures that there in no leaked or move to nearby devices as it’s transmitted. 

Disadvantages 

• Data transmission happens in eye sight. -> Meaning you can not have it in a big robot.
• Short range communication -> Actually this is an advantage in our case, which brings more security.
• Easily gets interrupted by obstacle  -> Meaning you can not have it in a robot with several layers between micro-controllers. Almost any kind of obstacle interrupt the signal.
• Not a good choice under extreme weather conditions(sunlight, rain, pollution etc) -> This is the most negative point for this technology not be used in an offshore robot.

Depending on the area of application Infrared might be or might not be the right choice. E.g. the short range of availability would increase our security a lot, while exactly in Walloid project the harsh weather condition is very common in future platforms. Today, there are many technologies exists that are much better than IR like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi etc.

Arduino boards LAN

A wild idea which I hope it's going to work ...

Arduino LAN

TAIL IO project

TAIL Integrated Operation, is a project leaded by Statoilhydro, trying to connect offshore platforms to the onshore offices, bringing down the number of staff on platforms and let expert, regardless of where they are, to communicate with the people on site. More about this comes later ...

Source : http://www.statoil.com/en/NewsAndMedia/Multimedia/features/Pages/io.aspx

Model - Controller - View design

Kinematic Calculations #2

No results yet ...

Positioning calculations, Walloid

Update 17.03.2011 : These calculations are totally wrong ... The whole concept is much easier than these things. See the new post about the positioning calculations.

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Although my supervisor meant that the positioning is happening through very easy geometrical calculation but I struggled a lot to find these equations. I am soon going to code this in my program for Walloid and come up with practical results. I should thank my dear friend Puya Afsharian who helped me a lot in figuring out some of the details.

Robot ideas

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928015.000-sticky-feet-send-insectbot-climbing-up-the-walls.html

Webcam & Processing

Updated, 22nd of February 2011
OpenCV seems to be the perfect tool to do the image processing calculation. A practical example.
---
Hey Shahab,
You should look at the flob library for blob detection. Its listed on the libraries page on processing.org. Its pretty simple to use. Also for better object detection, you might have more luck with openFrameworks, which is c++ based and has a better library for OpenCV.
For my project, I used the flob library and using the OSC protocol (oscp5 library for processing) I sent the data from the webcam to the sound generation program.
Using the OSC protocol you could also use something call openTSPS, by Rockwell Labs, which would be much more easier and exact since its also based on openFrameworks. So sense people with openTSPS and send the data via OSC to your program that controls the micro-controller.
Hope it helps.
Sumit
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On Feb 16, 2011, at 3:20 PM, Shahab F. M. wrote:
Hi.
I was wondering if u can give me some tips/tutorial links about webcam & processing. I am working on Walloid as my master thesis.
http://walloid.blogspot.com/
Shahab
Sent from my HTC

Internal Arduino Communication

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1153415010

Test units(JUnit) on the way ...

Today I got some tips from a very experienced programmer who is a team leader at a leading IT consulting company here at Norway. He advised to me to no matter what have test codes in my java code. No matter what use a version control system and have a structure in my coding. I think as long as I am so keen of having things planned and well-structured I would do implement his ideas into my master thesis to have a much clear expectation from myself and be able to plan better my way ahead. I think this would also give me the chance to do implement white box testing on my code and of-course more things to write about :-)

Zero positioning, new ideas

Lately I have been working on mounting an Open Source 3D printer called RepRap(Version 1.0, Darwin). While working on it, I learnt about their brilliant idea for Zero Positioning. They use a tiny beam light sensor(Opto endstop V2.1) which is interrupted by a small stick which is connected to the moving joint. The interrupted state defines that the moving joint is in the zero position.

Picture from : RepRap Blog

Problem of current position in case of loosing power & possible fixes ...

I think I have found my way to bear in mind the current position of the robot in case of the robot loosing power & not being able to drive itself back to the ZERO. The way is to either use the built in EEPROM(512 bytes), or other external storages which can be connected to Arduino. More info about EEPROM :

• http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/InterfacingWithHardware#Storage

The 2nd option is to always send the position to the computer and save it somewhere there at the program(Lots of traffic on serial port, higher risk to encounter problem or missing packages).

Too tiered to fix it now ... Later ...