Biped Robot Leg Prototyping

Heavily inspired by the Darwin OP robot by from Robotis and RoMeLa at Virginia Tech I have started A biped robot project.

So far I have constructed a prototype leg and have begun developing the software while finalising the mechancial aspects of the robot. The prototype leg design I am working with is a copy of the stock Bioloid Premium Type A configuration as seen below.

In this video I am demonstrating a simple pose, capture and playback program to test the range of motion in the leg and to make sure everything moves as expected. The program asks the user to pose the leg into two positions. Then does some simple linear interpolation between the poses, looping forever.



In the next video I have a test program that demonstrates the inverse kinematics algorithm I have developed for the leg. In this program I am able to enter 4 values (x,y,z,rotation) to position the center of the foot in relation to what would be the center of the robot.

AX-12 Monitor

AX-12 Monitor is a simple terminal program I am working on to interact with Dynamixel AX-12 Robot Actuator bus.

This program is still very much a work in progress but I plan on making the source along with a little bit of documentation available when it is finished.

Overo Gumstix Computer on Module

I have recently picked and begun experimenting with an Gumstix Overo Air COM (Computer on Module).

These interesting little computers are based on the ARM Cortex-A8 OMAP3503 Processor. The Air model that I chose to work with includes both 802.11g and Bluetooth wireless communication.

In the image below you can see the Gumstix Air booted from a micro sd card with and image of Linux version 2.6.36 and the GNOME desktop. This image also includes native development tools for c, c++ and python.

If all goes well I plan on using this single board computer in my future robotics projects.