Yesterday we met with Greg and Heather at the Children's Museum to get their advice on materials and construction for the robotic painter exhibit. While we were there we brought along our interns' cardboard mock-up of the exhibit and asked a bunch of kids of different ages to see if they could touch the top of the child's programming station. We wanted to make sure that they'd be able to easily reach all parts of the exhibit interface.

With the help of a step, even a two-and-a-half-year old visitor was able to touch the top.

With the cabinet design tested and client-approved, we're moving full-speed into construction!

today was kind of tough ....but once you get the hang of things it becomes pretty simple. Well today i learned how to program using python...aka a computer language is what i would call it. My lovely helper Lindsy helped me through everything and i thank her for that. with out her i would have been so lost. She says the programing gets easier, but i haven't experienced that part yet. I did not know all the things i do in regular day life like with the computer and things, i never knew what they did to get it to work. Today i know what they do behind the scenes. Programing can be pretty cool.

So Spring Break was kinda' boring... NOT!

A few of us, with not much of a personal life, came in to work on the robot arm. We started on the Friday before Spring Break and by the Monday of Spring Break Lauren and I had successfully gotten the robot arm constructed from the LynxMotion kit. That was an adventure in itself let me tell you; instructions written so haphazardly that it left us saying WTF every so often... but we got through it eventually and with help from Laura and Jim Valenti getting us the extra tools we needed. Thanks guys.

Speaking of Jim, he's apparently an electronics genius (well at least to someone like me, a software guy :)... we'll hopefully be going back to him later for some help in making our robot more robust. He'd suggested putting fuses between the servos and the controller board so wires won't suddenly catch fire. We'll also need him to build us a wall adapter unit that can share the power between the controller board and the servos cleanly... the current implementation uses a 9v battery to control the controller board and I really don't like the museum having to keep replacing a battery.

So here's an image of the assembled bot:
LynxMotion Arm assembled

The rest of the week was a nice steady flow of win... Lauren got the bot mounted on a temporary ground plane and setup the drawing area etc. I figured out how to connect the bot to my laptop using a USB-to-Serial (DB9) adapter and used the Cutecom raw serial terminal on Ubuntu Linux in a VMWare on my Mac OSX Macbook Pro... I love technology :). The bot only comes with crappy Windows software but luckily the controller board (SSC-32) is capable of accepting raw servo commands over the serial port in plaintext (115200 baud, 8N1)... the USB-to-Serial cable shows up as /dev/ttyUSB0 in Linux. Cutecom allowed me to play around with the servos individually and map out their capabilities. I created a quick spreadsheet of their minimum, maximum and median values and what they actually meant on the bot.

That was the easy part... the hard part was the Inverse Kinematics. We need to use Inverse Kinematics (IK) to be able to tell the hand joint, called the end effector (where the drawing pen is held), to be in a particular point in a 2D plane (ie. where the paper is). IK allows us to essentially solve for the angles of all the joints/servos on the arm so we get the end effector to that point in space. I'd done some research earlier and found 3 Excel spreadsheets where people had shown a 2D vector graph of an armature capable of doing IK. The spreadsheet essentially had the equations I needed to write our own IK solver. I ported the equations to Perl at first and got it giving me the same degree outputs that the spreadsheet was giving me. Unfortunately writing a serial communication interface in Perl to the bot was starting to be a pain. So I found a serial communication module in Python called pyserial which seemed to do the job beautifully. So I ported the IK stuff over to Python and started testing out the IK solving on the bot in the real world... oh man that was so much fail. Some solutions seemed to kinda work (ie. it moved in the general direction) while others were just WTF. So it was time to actually do the math and learn IK... Luckily for me (the math failure) Lauren had a lecture in Inverse Kinematics in her various Mechanical Engineering classes... and she had notes! So we went on the whiteboard and drew out all the triangles and angles and related it to her notes and slowly but surely found the right equations (freaking law of cosines... I'd totally forgotten about that from high school). The "aha!" moment was satisfying to say the least.

Sooo we finally got the bot painting, not perfectly but painting nonetheless. Next up is creating a clean software framework and figuring out the pen picking up/putting down etc. Also I need to figure out some heuristics to get the perfect stroke with the fastest speed... it might come down to more samplings of points and/or adding more points in the strokes. In general the wider apart the sample points that the servos interpolate between (group servo motion in a given time frame), the worse the approximation of the stroke.

Anyways, here are some images of the baby bot's artwork:

BotArt: First Stroke (manual control): First Stroke (manual control)
(NOTE: It's the big green line not the drawing of the display layout on the back which was done by our other bot Laura :)

BotArt: Square: First IK drawing (square)

BotArt: Circle: First IK circles

BotArt: Circle + Square: Circle (slow/accurate) + Square

Yesterday the team met with a group of our new interns (Sasha, Malika, Erin, Katie, and Breonna) at the ETC for the first time. Rebecca led us through some getting-to-know you games, Drew (our ETC director) gave us a tour, and then we all went to the project room to eat snacks and talk about our plans for the Children's Museum robot painter exhibit. It was a whirlwind tour and a ton of information—now the girls have had a chance to see what we do here at the ETC and start thinking about how they want to get involved.

The girls have lots of interests in addition to robotics. For example, Malika really enjoys taking photos, so you'll probably see her photography up on this website soon. Katie shadows a veterinarian, which makes me think she may have a special interest in the ETC's AIBO, a robotic dog that is programmed to respond to its environment and simulate learning behavior (mimicking the way a real dog can be trained to perform tricks). Breonna loves to cook and wants to become a chef, which got made me wondering whether anyone uses robotics in cooking. So I went on Google and searched for pittsburgh robot cook. I found a news story about Hyperactive Technologies, creators of "Hyperactive Bob," a system that uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to manage the kitchens at restaurants. I was a little surprised to find robotic-related technologies used with cooking at all—I'm amazed that there's a company focused on this just a 15-minute drive away.

We're meeting up with our interns again tomorrow. Not all of our interns have joined us yet, so keep an eye out for new additions to our Intern team members page!