Old robotics projects

Below is a collection of old robotics projects, mainly focused on electronics, with some basic robotics logic.

Raspberry pi - based robot #

Using a simple robot chassis kit and a rasperry pi, this robot ran a python program which:

• Used xbox controller input to drive it with a desired velocity
• Controlled a pan and tilt mechanism for a camera and streamed the video to a webserver

FPGA - controlled cardboard robot arm #

To try something simple with FPGAs, I used verilog to write a FGPA program that accepted position commands over uart, and drove three servo motors. This controlled a simple robot arm that I put together with cardboard and superglue. Surprisingly, it didn’t fall apart and the links themselves were pretty stiff. Of course, this was with no load.

Line following robot using ESP32 and RTOS #

With this robot, it was my first time using the ESP32 microcontroller and RTOS. I re-used the chassis from the previous rasperry pi robot. It had two pcbs - one for monitoring current and enabling power through a relay, and another which did the logic. At this time, my pcbs were still quite basic, and were just a bunch of headers to slot breakout boards into.

“Motion-controlled” robot #

For this project, I had the ambitious goal of attaching an IMU to a glove, tracking it’s motion, and controlling a cheap robot arm kit. In the end, it didn’t really work at all, since I didn’t know how to do proper filtering / state estimation on the sensor data at the time, and even if I had, the IMU was very cheap so might not have been accurate enough.

In the end, I attached some buttons to the glove fingers, and used a combination of which button is selected, and roll of my hand, to control specific components of velocity (in polar coordinates). This allowed me to control the gripper to pick things up, although it was very tedious.