March updates

Not a good couple of weeks for the robot the torso was to unstable the robot was in danger of tipping over. then the main computer failed long story short i replaced the it with a new I7 main computer. that works much better the WIFI is only 5 but still works. the battery charger started to fail resulting in a shorter run time. the new charger gives a 2 hour run time now. Navigation is starting to head in the right direction. we still get stuck in tight spots we have achieved a few way point navs.

A few thoughts

• charging system needs beefing up we are having wire power loss
• add in the 3rd battery for a extra 18AH
• start navigation tuning with a new map
• see how a boost charge affects run time

using a LLM with vscode has made tuning the robot easier

networks and bugs

 

For the last couple of months I have been chasing bugs first the network was slow which made the robot uncontrollable I switched out the I5 for a RPI5 but had to add a UPS to give the RPI enough power. Better but not enough I switched the middle ware to Zenoh but that required a upgrade to ROS2 Jazzy and Ubuntu 24.4 it soon became apparent that the RPI5 didn’t have the speed to run the complete stack not even enough to run the robot and cameras. I replaced the WiFi in the I5 from a USB dongle to a express WiFi card so we we ran the network at the same speed as the RPI but I was getting packet drop I added a extra WiFi access point tied to the wired network the I5 went from 120 kbit/s to 300 mbit/s a big improvement, we can now run the robot with everything required running with very little lag. The next task was getting auto dock working to dock in reverse in the end it was simpler just to write my own node. With all the systems running on the robot I started having battery fails we replace the battery for the other robot but that didn’t last very long. A bit more digging the robot draws 4 amps for the moment we changed the way we operate by docking the robot between tasks. Now that only left Navigation to sort out after a few days of tuning and reading we adjusted the global cost map inflation to give smooth pathways and the velocity smoother to keep velocities that work with the robot. We can navigate around the house and it will work most of the time still more tuning required but that is for another day. We also started to add the covers on the robot now that we can navigate through door ways it time to put on the torso