There is no doubt that it was more than a decade ago, when Boston released the test video of AlphaDog, the first feeling was shocked, because the previous anti-life robot has been concerned about the bipedal humanoid robots of Japan’s HONDA and TOYOTA, which are the same clumsy movements as the elderly, and they have felt very cool. I don’t think there is not afraid to kick the dog, can walk freely on a variety of rugged terrain, but when people immediately very melancholy, know that this thing belongs to the high-tech company laboratory products, to the folk estimate is impossible, then also look at the video addiction is equivalent to watching a science fiction film, and then forward to the people around you to brag about it.
Until 2020, open source brushless motor robot dogs emerged in China, based on MIT’s Cheetah open source project, so that many laboratories can play at low prices. But the overall price is still high for ordinary students and general interest enthusiasts. So began to tinker with the steering machine to do the robot dog program, but also with a variety of open source project code a variety of open source appearance, pieced together, made several sets of steering machine dog. During this period, I have used Raspberry PI (4B,3B+,3A+,ZERO 2), orange pie, upboard, jetson (nano, tx1,tx2), all of which have been tested. The compatibility of Raspberry PI is good, and orange pie is affordable. UPBOARD is an alternative because it is X86, and JETSON has strong performance. Then recently found that the X3 of the domestic rising sun surprise found that the highest cost performance, the same price can also have the edge computing power, is very conscientious, the test process found that the X3 of the rising Sun, than the orange pie program, obviously smoother, the robot dog walking efficiency is much higher.
Below I will use the rising sun motherboard to do the robot dog to show you, there is a lot of room for improvement, will slowly upgrade.
What can really give play to the motherboard of Rising Sun is its edge computing power, which can be used to develop graphics recognition in the future. At present, I only use OPENCV temporarily to transmit feedback to the robot dog’s camera picture, and add a face recognition function, which is just a simple demonstration. When the mobile phone app remotely views the robot dog’s camera picture, it can identify the face library recorded by the robot dog before.
Robot parameters are as follows:
Weight: About 5 kg, about 9.5 kg!
Body type: about 56.5 cm long, about 31 cm tall after standing, about 30 cm wide
Steering gear specification: 60KG high torque digital advanced steering gear, quiet and smooth
Battery: High power 2S power cell, large capacity 8000 mah
Battery life: 2-3 hours or so, intermittently can play a morning
Remote control handle: 2.4G wireless remote control handle. (PS4 Bluetooth controller can also be supported)
Motherboard: Rising Sun X3
Development language: PYTHON3, the code is all open source without encryption, can be freely modified 2 times development
ROS environment support, remote control or APP ->ROS interface → Robot dog action control
Plug-in: led magic light belt with reminding function, and mini OLED small display to remind system status and IP,
Action function: can be multi-directional left and right, parallel and oblique walk, etc., circle in place or circle around the central axis.
Voice interactive chat, play music, voice control robot dog walking
Support remote control, and support mobile phone Android APP, WINDOWS client program, LAN WIFI remote camera monitoring and remote control, or with fixed IP (external network address) can also achieve Internet remote control.
First, as for the motherboard brush SD card system these basic operations are not introduced, the official description is very detailed, according to personal habits, the board brush good system, the first is to change the system default user name,
The steps are as follows:
Own account, such as zen:
a. Log in through the serial port as user root (do not log in as user sunrise)
nano /etc/light*/*.d/22*
If you change it to a new user, it won’t automatically log in,
autologin-user=zen
usermod -l zen sunrise # Change the account of sunrise to zen
groupmod -n zen sunrise # Modify the group
mv /home/sunrise /home/zen # Change the original sunrise directory
usermod -d /home/zen zen # Set this directory to the home directory of the sunrise user
cat /etc/passwd
Finally, there are:
zen:x:1000:27:sunrise,:/home/zen:/bin/bash
After the above modification, you can use the new account zen to log in
Change zen user password:
sudo passwd zen
Second, every time you use sudo, you need to enter a password, which becomes very tedious. Still according to personal habits, the first solution to sudo frequently enter the password is to modify the /etc/sudoers file
sudo nano /etc/sudoers
Find the following line in the middle of the file:
# Allow members of group sudo to execute any command
Put the line #%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
Change it to the following:
%sudo ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL
Then save and exit, restart the system to take effect.
Third, the next need to determine the motherboard I2C,SPI and other interfaces.
The default SPI is /dev/spidev2.0
The default I2C is /dev/i2c-0
Finally, assign permissions to the hardware
sudo chmod -R 777 /dev/i2c-*
sudo chmod -R 777 /dev/spi*
sudo chmod -R 777 /dev/video*
sudo usermod -aG dialout zen
Fourth, the robot dog code through the winscp tool software, the robot dog python code uploaded to the robot dog:
5. Install all the library files required by the robot dog, and then add the main program of the machine dog to the system startup directory. Copy it to /etc/systemd/system/ as a.service file
Then:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable joystick
sudo systemctl start joystick
sudo systemctl enable robot
sudo systemctl start robot
Sixth, next, to the motherboard with a small fan heat dissipation, relying on its own heat dissipation aluminum block is still very high temperature, just the motherboard has a serial port for external communication, because usually do not need to use, directly through the serial port to provide power to the fan.
By the way, a small voltage display module is connected, which can be convenient to see the battery voltage of the robot dog at any time, convenient and timely charging!
There is the motherboard power supply, I used a 10A step-down module to 5V power supply to the motherboard, before the power supply was connected to the 5V pin of the motherboard, when the use of 10 days is very normal, is later do not know why the motherboard is broken, suspected that the pin is not designed power protection, The motherboard was suddenly turned off quickly and then turned on the power surge caused by the motherboard impact was broken, but this is possible, and later the manufacturer repaired it, this time I put the power supply through the TYPEC head, the only thing is that the connector is harmful to the appearance, afraid of bad again, although I used raspberry PI and orange pie for many years, it has been powered to the 5V pin port of the motherboard, and there has never been a problem.
The rest is connected to the steering engine control board and OLED screen through I2C, I am PYTHON code, with the global ready-made library, Adafruit-SSD1306 simply can not drive the OLED small screen, because the company has not developed in place at home and abroad, the supporting library file people, Have not yet to respect the definition of the rising Sun’s board, I hope that the Rising Sun engineers can submit the definition of the motherboard involved in the OLED screen Adafruit-SSD1306 driver to GITHUB, let them add.
7, not good at drawing, casually use STL design software to directly design the body skeleton, directly print
