After spending most of my vacation enjoying myself I managed to get OKQ1 walking today.
This is by no means final or optimized. It was really just a quick hack to try walking for the first time. You can see the program halt twice… not sure what exactly caused that yet.
The ghetto controller you see in the video is made out of three axis joysticks, a atmega168 breakout board, an xbee and a small lipo all stuffed into a USPS mailing box.
I have been working on ideas for simple target tracking or auto targeting systems to use in Mech Warfare that do not require an on board computer running vision software. I believe that I have found a suitable solution and this week I have made some significant progress prototyping it.
Below you can watch two videos of the prototype tracking/targeting system.
Unlike all my other Mech Warfare work I will not be releasing the details on this system until after the 2013 Robogames event.
After my hiatus from competing in 2012 I have started a new mech to dominate in 2013!
OKQ1 (Off-Kilter Quad One) will be an MX servo based quad with four degree of freedom legs.
Between the end of MW 2012 and now I have been experimenting and perfecting new IK calculations, gait algorithms and control ideas.
In this first video you can see me testing my 4DOF IK calculations with a single leg. The foot is being moved in a circular motion. You can see that the final leg joint is always kept perpendicular to the ground.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He6WeLmsaYc
In this second video you can see my first test of the new gait algorithm working smoothly and accurately.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-W1z0hRlE8
As always my work is open and freely available. Take a look at my github account.
Spending the last few days before RoboGames 2012 getting the Mech Warfare MWScore Scoring Server software into shape.
An exciting new feature I have added is the ability for match data to be broadcast to other computers on the same network as the scoring server PC.
Source for everything related to the MWScore system (PC server software, transponder firmware and transponder board designes) can be found on my MWScore project page.
30 MWScore transponder boards ready to be assembled….
The tank guns I was planning on using on my mech Gold Rush were just not cutting it for me. Problems included gear skipping and motors burning up. So I was forced to ditch them and went for something a bit bigger.
