Magnetic Encoders

Robbie is now fully functional again after his computer problems the reason the arms missed commands was due to the controllers resetting. after I supplied power to the USB hubs every thing worked as required.

To increase the accuracy of the arm I started replacing the potentiometers with magnetic encoders to fit the new encoders required a few modification to the gearbox, I incorporated a bearing in the top of the gearbox and a mount for the magnet in the drive gear plus a few extra tweaks to increase the strength of the assembly not all modification will be fitted at the same time some will wait until the next major rebuild

Moveit Update

Robbie's moveit configuration is working again accuracy is 15 cm not very good but magnetic encoders will help plus a better calibration. Obstacle avoidance suffers because planning only just misses the obstacles. Robbie now has a point at node where he will point to a published target pose.

Face recognition

We are now running the COB face recognition package this works well in daylight but the garage is to dark Robbie makes a few errors, I need to add more lights. The AI will say Hello when he first recognises a face then after 5 minutes he will just say Hi. The name of the recognised face is returned to the chat bot so he knows who he is talking to

Object recognition

will recognise a pre programmed object but wont learn a new object because ECTO requires direct access to the kinect driver Freenect uses a different driver and Openni will not work under indigo

2d recognition, shift and surf and not included in the opencv package so its very flaky

Navigation

Increasing the Global inflation will make Robbie plan further away from obstacles.

Autonomous operation

shutdown command will not work when Robbie is started using robot upstart also depth registered points from the top kinect will not always work unless something uses it straight away the lower kinect has the point cloud to laser scan and gives no trouble. I will start face recognition on start up and see if it remains stable. We haven't had any jitters or strange events since we started using the powered hubs for the arduinos. The current high temperatures are causing a few resets I need a bigger fan and more vents in the CPU bay

Robbie's Emotion system

has been turned off for the moment since he spent most of the time bored and kept quoting a markovian chain from Sun Tzu. It needs a lot more configuration and thought but its fun for a while

As the design of Robbie matures I'm starting to add covers to hide the wires and keep dust off electronics but this has induce a few extra problems

1. Heat build up
   more fans need to be included in the design
2. striped out threads
   printed PLA and MDF wont hold a thread for very long so now I will add M3 threaded inserts and M4 rivnuts to the structure