Control Update

Finally got around to adding a reverse and fixed a fixing a major problem with the steering going haywire every now and then. This was caused by reverse actually trying to turn the wheels to 180 degrees (limit is 150). After this   we can now drive on joystick control without the wheels going out of calibration.we need to add a larger dead band around zero's

Adding IMU

Today we added a CHR UM6-LT IMU to the omni bot communications is through a sparkfun   FTDI board
the first problem we encountered was the RX and TX line need to be reversed. The other problem was
quanterions need to be enabled which can only be done in windows.
After downloading the ROS package  imu_um6 (searching ROS under sensors not IMU) and
launching we were publishing data from the IMU. Next step is to add a covariance matrix and run robot pose  EKF

Omni actions

Just a quick note the actions move_to_fish_tank and go_home work in directory robbie

AI or how interact with the world

After a long build program it time to think operating the robot in the home environment and interacting with people we had a lot of functionality already it just a matter tighing it all together. The first part is the meet and greet function using the resources from UA-CS665 and Face_recognition ROS packages.
the functions are as follows
1    When a unknown face enters Robbie will track the face and ask some questions and store them in short term memory
2     use voice commands to navigate or action servers to bo basic tasks
3     track objects and recognise objects using roboearth

the next phase is to extend the conversation skills building on the UA-CS665 Conversation.py

things that i need to work on
1    make short term memory non volatile
2   a better boot gui

Navigation Testing

We start the new year with Omni_bot's odometery working we can see the results in Rviz, work still needs to be done with calibration but before we start there we still need the front steering motors controller. But at least we can set a goal in Rviz and the robot will get there
If the heading is straight a head then ok
but if it in involves sharpe turns then we have problems
it appears to spin to it target rather then loop maybe we have set rotation to fast
after adjusting the goal tolerance to .2 we are getting better results


more to follow