Making a

self learning robot

(Last update: 8th November 2019)

Background

I've been passionate about robotics since 2007 when I started playing and developing software for the RS Media and Sphero. That's another story and if you what to find out more here is a link.

As I do STEM works workshops every year for local school children I try to make it as entertaining and fun as possible to get them interesting in engineering. This is why I decided to try an make robot but that would be simple to program and also have some artificial intelligence. I was going to make a robot ant/spider that would interact with the students. This would mean having to learn a lot of new skills and I ended up changing the type of robot and what I would be doing.

Project Diary

08-11-2019

It has been a few months since I've done any work on this project but as I have a STEM work event on 12th December 2019 I really want to try and get to the stage where the robot is safe to use and can do an automatic task such as detecting coloured blocks and sorting so I can demonstrate the arm.

It going to be a bit of a push but I am hoping to get all the following tasks complete over the next few weeks in time for the STEM event:

Refresh my memory on robot
make the movement smoother
Make a control pad with a few function (e.g. Record program, Play program, Clear program)
design & 3D print a skin shell for the robot arm
Add a colour sensor to the arm
Create a sample project to use the colour sensor (e.g. sorting block, detecting if somthing is close, etc)
Possible add a programmable led strip to the arm that will change colour with the colour sensor( I use this technique on another project for the previous STEM workshop I took part in)

I first thought lets try and make a 4 legged robot and use 2 micro bit to control it, 1 as the sender the other as the robot controller.

I designed and 3D printed the shell of the robot and added some MG90 servos and created some basic software to control it. It worked well.

The 4 legged robot work but I found it quite awkward to make it walk as I had to ensure 3 legs were on the ground at any one time to prevent it from falling over.

I then decided to change it to have 6 legs instead. This worked much better but found two issues:

The MG90 servos were really under power for the task.
Programming the robot to walk was a tedious and slow task.

To overcome these issues I needed to do a test project.

I bought more powerful metal geared servos and hacked them all to add a feed back wire which allowed me to record the position of each servo an play back the sequence of steps.

I made a 6 Axis robot arm and using a Arduino Nano, and 16 channel servo controller to control the robot arm.

This worked but it was very jerky and I ended up adding sub steps to the movement which smoothed the movement drastically.

The future plans for the project

Add color sensor so I can give it basic optical recognition
Make the arm play a music instrument that has colour coding
Remake the robot ant/spider with artificial intelligence
Add Structure Core so it can scan and explore its environment autonomously

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