The first prototype of our robot was tethered to a PC. Ultimately, we want the robot to be controlled tetherless. To achieve this goal, a wireless mechanism for passing commands to the robot is required. We use trasmitter and receiver module and GL-104 encoder/decoder chip made by Glolab.
Although the tranmitter has only 16 keys, using the finite state diagram in our CommandInterpreter class, thousands of commands can be given to our robot.
Some redundant intermediate steps have been eliminated from the robot flipping motion. In the first prototype a full step of the robot was decomposed into two half steps with a straight up intermediate step in between.
More recently, a more compact version of CME-555 board was used. This controller board, PB-555, has a dimension of 3.5in by 3.5in.
In the first prototype, the foot did not have any touch sensors. Therefore, the foot placement algorithm had to do a blind search for aligning the foot to the surface. With the touch sensors, the foot placement algorithm is able to do guided search.
This picture shows the size of the touch sensors compared to a dime.
This picture shows how the touch sensors installed on one of the feet.
Our first robot prototype uses a flipping motion to step from one foot to the other. This second prototype uses a crawling locomotion method.
The following picture shows the TI DSP evaluation board connected to the circuit that we made on the protoboard to control our robot.
The following pictures shows the same board with the protoboard circuit replaced by a PCB "piggy-back" connected to the DSP evaluation board.
