Team Shakey Build Diary

[Remote-Controlled Dave]

3D printers are alien to me but I didn't know they ran on Haribo.

[Shakey]

I find the flex of a haribo chassis really helps absorb spinner hits when combined with a hard metal such as titanium to prevent any cutting. The main problem though is trying not to eat your robot during an AWS.

[Shakey]

I thought I'd do a quick update as it's been a bit quiet.

First up the printer is now running very nicely with the new E3Dv6 hotend meaning I can now print Nylon and Polycarbonate! Though I need to bake the moisture out my nylon, you'd have though the printer ran on steam from my first attempt.

To the other owners if this printer I'm also running this off of two power supplies, one giving 12V to everything except the heated bed and the other giving the heated bed 14V so it can run hotter and get their quicker (I want to increase the voltage a bit more though). The upgrade was done in a bit of an emergency to fulfil a time critical order after the original nozzle irreparably clogged (the ptfe jammed into the nozzle and it wouldn't unscrew from the filament drive). Luckily preparation for the swap had been going on for a while and while it isn't the setup I wanted I had printed enough test pieces to get the new nozzle running, I still need to add a print cooling fan back onto the printer.


I also have been ordering quite a bit for many weird and wacky robots. I forgot to include the pneumatic parts collection in this picture however I am nearly ready to make a pneumatic ant (just waiting on some fittings), also ordered some Gr5 titanium so watchout!


A bit of a peek at what I'm working on for the store. Toughened 5 stage nanoweight gearboxes (Essentially my standard design with a bearing added) for use in ants and fleas, and a prototype mould for 20-25mm silicone wheel tyres. I have also nearly got an actual webstore running as well, just a few last issues to iron out. Should help me keep the set-up nice and organised and make it easier for people to order.


I decided I needed a new challenge. I have challenged myself to make an actual successful autonomous robot. However I'm going about this a different way. This Kinect v2 camera will be used to pull colour imagery, grey scale imagery and a 3D map of the battle in progress which will be fed into a small (the box under it, shoebox sized) PC. The PC will crunch the data and draw up commands for the robot which will be sent via an e-flite blade module converted to be USB to the robot. This means the robot itself does not need anything onboard to be autonomous. In theory I could chose any DSM2 robot to fight using the system. To start with though it will be being put on a spinner, after all that whole international kerfuffle about weaponised AI doesn't really apply to ants... right? At first it will fight very simplistically but the eventual idea is the kinect will watch every battle that takes place (not just its own) and learn from the victor/dominant robot to draw up a fighting style(s). Hopefully it should be able to contend with a person, this would be my end goal. If it ever reaches the point where it could fight with a robot like ICBINS with the same level of tactics I will be amazed but I can hope! There is one problem though... I need to test whether the infra-red portion of the kinect can see through polycarbonate though, if not it may have to go in the arena. It can also record each battle as well in lovely 60FPS HD. If you have any concerns about this system or if the camera needed to be positioned inside the arena please let me know. I do plan on allowing anyone the use of the equipment, note I will not be allowing other people to use or be releasing my code that actually does the fighting, just allowing other people to write their own code to run on my machine if they are up to the challenge (It could be annoying if others follow suit and we have 3 cameras trying to be positioned around the arena!).

Onto some bigger robots:

This is my gearbox setup for my 4wd featherweight axe rammer, I'll be printing the body of this and then compressing it all between ali endcaps to give it strength. Hopefully this should create a very small and light drive setup but packing a massive amount of power!


My heavyweight is slowly gathering parts, I have everything except some pneumatic fittings and an ESC now. Pictured is the chassis with the motors test fitted on the makeshift trolly (Made out of an old electric wheelchair after I removed the motors). The two feathers in front are also in for repair, both of them are getting new drive systems fitted and with any luck one of them might work!

Thanks for reading, have some trains:

[AntRoboteer]

I'm very interested in your autonomous robot idea; looks fantastic! Especially that Shuttle computer case. I've always wanted one of those tiny things to build in. Have you got an ITX motherboard for it yet?

[Shakey]

Thanks, I haven't got the motherboard yet as I will be using my current PC for now. It's kind of odd as it HAS to use USB 3.0 and not every USB controller is compatible so you have to be really careful about motherboards/interface cards. I'm trying to keep the setup compact enough to not get in the way at events.

[AntRoboteer]

Ah, yes, USB 3.0 is a bit of a problem sometimes. It probably doesn't work on some cards or controllers maybe because the ports lack the extra 5 pins which are used in USB 3.0 ports but not USB 2.0 ports, even if they are connected up to a USB 3.0 controller. I've seen macs which have this issue before.

Personally, when I built a mini-ITX computer, I used the AMD AM1 platform for it's power efficiency and of course low cost. Their motherboards have USB 3.0 built in if you wanted to go that route. I used a Sempron 3850 quad core (1.3GHz) and an MSI AM1I just to keep things cheap but still powerful. You can purchase them new quite cheaply but I got a good deal with mine used with a case and PSU.

New from Amazon, the Sempron is £24.95 for the quad core model (or £19.99 for a dual core if you are not too bothered about performance) and it includes graphics (because it's one of AMD's APUs) and a heatsink:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/AMD-SD3850JAHMB ... 4PN8YD6D3D
And the motherboard for £24.44 which has 2 USB ports:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/MSI-AM1I-Mini-M ... 3Q6PX2RPRX

Looking at the case though, I'm not actually sure if ITX will fit (screw mounting holes and whatnot) so you'd better check that but the PSU should be more than capable seeing as it's a very low power system. Standard DDR3 DIMMs also fit in (I'm just using XMS3 which I picked up on eBay but you can get some a lot cheaper). The motherboard has a PCIex16 slot (although it only runs at x4 for some reason) so you could potentially add in a USB 3.0 card if you had difficulties. It has full graphics capabilities if you required them so no need for a graphics card either.

It would be more than capable of doing what you require as well because that's a pretty powerful processor. Hope that's helped a bit!

[Shakey]

The case is a CFI A8989 Mini-ITX Cube Case, I need to do some load testing to see how powerful the PC needs to be to run it. I kinda forgot about the APUs and now you've reminded me that's a much more logical solution to this, thanks for the links! The PSU only has 150W so I'd be pushing it to get the 5670 I have in there aswell (Which was going to provide the graphical processing). I will have to check around for how kinects run on APU's, they are kindof oddly supported so it may not like it, I wonder if the later APUs that expose the graphical cores (like the Xbox has) would be better. Plus I do like to messa round with gpu cores, I used to have a bitcoin mining pc that had ~8500 stream processors which was really fun to run programs on!

The case with the USB3.0 is (while you do have to watch out for the pin counts) the fact the kinect is sending a truly impressive amount of data back and a lot of the controllers either can't actually handle the amount of data correctly or there is some odd firmware thing going on as it is using the port in a fancy way to achieve the bandwidth. Many of the intel controllers seem to work, there are lists online of people gathering configurations they know to work so I'll just have to be careful of which one I get.

Really if I wanted this to be easy I should have gotten the kinect for windows but that costs a lot of money compared to the £35 I spent a CEX and the hour I spent modifying it to work with a PC!

My hope is by doing this offboard processing the robot can use a greater amount of information to fight in a more complex way as opposed to being a weaponised sumo robot. The tricky part will be consistently identifying it in the arena and also dealing with things like clusters. There are so many little bits of information to grab aswell, such as whether you are on their scoop or if they are on yours. If that hit damaged yourself or if the other bot is immobile/should be left alone. Last thing I want is a spinner that keeps attacking a bot shredding it to pieces when it could back off and win!

[Rapidrory]

Theory

At first it will fight very simplistically but the eventual idea is the kinect will watch every battle that takes place (not just its own) and learn from the victor/dominant robot to draw up a fighting style(s). Hopefully it should be able to contend with a person, this would be my end goal.

Reality

*takes 6 months of coding just to keep a robot in the arena*

Computer vision is never simple

[Shakey]

Only if you're very silly and insist on writing your own libraries! The 3D depth map simplifies the entire thing quite a bit though.

[AntRoboteer]

From what I can see from the Passmark GPU scores for both the integrated graphics on the APU (called Radeon R3 but I have found them to be called HD8250s) and the HD5670 and they are pretty comparable although the 5670 is a bit better. However, the APU suggested doesn't require much power at all really and has a max TDP of 25W which is great for small PSUs and I'm sure that you could get the 5670 in there if you really needed to. On the other hand, the performance improvement may not be too great over the integrated. Have you considered one of the A series APUs (FM2/FM2+) and coupling it in that APU crossfire setup with one of the cheap low end discrete GPUs such as the R7 240? That may deliver really impressive results if you needed a lot of power.

I believe the AM1 platform are very similar to the AMD APUs used in the PS4 and XBOX ONE so perhaps that would be an ideal combination? I really don't know.

As for the USB 3.0 controller, I see what you mean about bandwidth. I've never really had any issues with any of my ones and I believe the controller for the USB 3.0 is actually built into the APU itself on the AM1 platform as those APUs are technically SOCs and integrate pretty much everything.