Bioloid Control

Information

This program was created as part of a three months work at University of Karlsruhe (Germany). It consists of a robot control program (μC), a 3d-visualisation program (PC) and the main control program (PC):

• Robot controller:
  This μC-program reads and writes data from the servos and sensors. It supports linear and jolt-limited acceleration profiles, asynchronous, message-based communication with the pc-program via RS-232 and complete control of the Ax12s and AxS1s.
• OpenGL-Visualisation:
  The viewer-program reads polygonal data from a shared memory and displays it on screen.
• Main control program:
  This program controls the robot in a closed loop by sending messages to and receiving messages from the robot (the robot and pc have to be connected via the serial cable). See the feature-list below for a complete description.

Features

• Supports both Windows and Linux machines
• Simulation mode (can be used without a robot)
• Supports custom robot configurations (the geometric and kinematic model, frames and collision objects can be configured in a xml file)
• Easy hardware and software configuration via PC (f.e. Ax12-, PID-controller-, timing-parameters, selection of a movement profiles)
• 3d-Visualisation of the robot (OpenGL)
• Forward kinematics (based on Denavit Hartenberg matrices)
• Inverse kinematics (analytic solution for custom humanoid and custom hexapod (see section robots), rudimentary numerical solution (transpose jacobian technique))
• Fast collision checking (Oriented Boundary Boxes)
• Online robot information in custom console (Linux only, needs ncurses)
• Fail-proof (CRC) communication via RS-232
• Scripting language: Complete control of the robot, extendable
• Capture (continuous and discrete), load, store and join robot movements
• Play motions with different interpolation types (linear, bezier (and splines) in cartesian and joint space)
• Point-To-Point movement in robot and joint space (can be mixed)
• Command system (f.e. walk, turnright)
• Supports Motion Editor files (thanks to Bullit)

Videos

Here are some short clips I've created in the context of a discussion at robosavvy: S-Curves discussion.

All motions were created without parameter tweaking and without control of the max. torque and max. speed (which would produce smoother results):

• Comparison of:
  1. linear
  2. sinoidal s-curve (1x acceleration)
  3. sinoidal s-curve (2x)
  4. sinoidal s-curve (4x)
  5. sinoidal s-curve (8x)
  6. sinoidal s-curve (16x)
  interpolation in cartesian space:
  
• Simple swinging motion (the two extreme positions were recorded (see next video) and a spline was used for interpolation):
  
• Bioloid picks up a box:
  Demonstration of simple playback (teach-in, kinaesthetic) programming:
  1. Robot stands upright (torque is enabled).
  2. Capturing begins: torque is disabled, so the limbs can be moved by hand.
  3. Every time my left arm is not in view I hit the return key and the current robot pose is stored (additionally it's possible to automatically capture a keyframe every X milliseconds).
  4. I record 6 keyframes one after another.
  5. After the "stand" script has been executed and the robot is standing upright again I play the motion (with linear interpolation in joint space).
• Omnidirectional walking:
  
  1. 6 steps forward (1x speed)
  2. 8 steps forward and left (1x speed)
  3. 20 steps forward and left (0.5x speed)
  4. 6 steps forward (1x speed)
• Bioloid kneels down (written in custom scripting language):
  
• Bioloid swings his left arm. You can see the following interpolation types:
  1. splines in joint space
  2. linear in cartesian space
  3. linear in joint space
• Show by stevo3d (robosavvy forums) converted to own format (without timing parameters by BCP). It doesn't fit very well to my customized robot (robot falls at the end)).