Gizmo Update

The last couple of weeks Gizmo has continued testing, the goal has been to make it more reliable and autonomous and we are making progress in that part. The biggest change has been the addition of a microphone array on his head. This was not easy the software only runs on the latest Rasbian, and ROS needs to be installed from source  it took about a week before it was all running.
Gizmos current status is

1. navigation works but still passes to close to objects if we set way points Gizmo will navigate through doors and narrow corridors and still be localized correctly at the end.
2. Moveit will move the arms to a location and track a moving target but the dynamixels servos will overheat after a short time.
3. Auto-docking and battery management work in semi automatic mode only

 The new external microphone opens a lot of potential ideas in a quite room Gizmo will recognize voices out to 2.5 meters with the TV running we are down to about 1 meter. We are using python speech recognizer and Google STT in default mode, snowboy for hot work recognition. it take about 8 seconds from start of command to returned text. the text is passed to a python chatbot for response and action requests are passed to the behavior tree.

Gizmo the new Robbie

Gizmo is a merger of 3 robots
Bentley a smallish robot
Robbie a big Inmoov style robot
Max a navigation test robot
All 3 had design problems Bentley was too small, Robbie was too big and had trouble navigating around the house and Max was a good size but the drive train was fragile. And last of all 3 robots was just too much. Time for a rethink, so I combined the best features of all. The basic style of Bentley the size of Max and the systems and parts of Robbie.
Gizmo was designed

• to be lifted to a workbench for maintenance
  
• small enough to navigate with low resolution sensors
  
• big enough to hold the components with easy access
  
• 5 hour run time
  
• and not look like a box with appendages
  

The first version was made with tubing to check for fits and clearances

Version 2 was mostly 3D printed and a new drive train using sprocket and chain