Wendesday 11/3

Today we finished the basic aruino code for the movement of JAM. It is now possible to move the motors forward, backward, left and right.

Tuesday 10/3

Today we managed to build the circuits for the motors and solder them together. We also begun doing the basic structure of the robot where the wheels will be attached.

Monday 9/3

Today we finally got our DC-motors that we ordered from Conrad. We build a circuit to try them out and they worked fine. (http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/Tutorials/HighCurrentLoads) They are much stronger than the stepper motors and will probably be more then enough power for us. But we needed to build a circuit that could control the directions of the motor independently of each other in order to turn. After a lot of searching we found a circuit that worked: (http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/Labs/DCMotorControl#toc2) We can now control the direction of the motors with the bread board and will now continue by soldering the circuit, we need to build two of them in order to operate both motors at the same time.

We also begun the planing of a user study that we will carry out in order to get feedback and ideas for the robot.

...

speech

First trials of the conversation the robot could do:

Monday 2/3

Today we wrote on the design document and made and the changes necessary. We discussed the results of the low-fi prototype presentation and we also had a meeting with Olof. The web cam can now detect specific objects. We also started do do some more sketches and investigated what we needed to be able to use the 3d-printer.

Monday 2/3

Meeting with olof:

3d printer: STL-file (.stl ?) Standard format, that 3d modelling uses. olof.wranne@chalmers.se.
Battery: Just buy a batteries.

Work on the personalities: What will the robot do when it meets people, when it meets then the second time.

Don't waste to much time on having maps etc in the brain. Focus on avoiding obstacles and finding people.

General look: How will it look like and so on.

Monday 23/2

We decided use DC-motors with a gear box instead of the stepper motors. We figured that the stepper motors were not strong enough even though we used two for each wheel. We will order 2 motors today from Conrad Art.no: 233132 @ www.conrad.se

The serial communication now works between open framework and arduino board.

We have also prepared the Lo-fi prototype presentation that we have on Wednesday to get some feedback from the class.

Thursday 19/2

Today we got the motor working in parallell and next time we will start soldering to try them out secure with the arduino. We also got a voice synthesis working. Next step there is to integrate it with the c++ code. We were testing out the firmata protocol for the arduino.

IR proximity sensors

We have decided that we will use 5 - 6 sensors. In front we will place 3 of them on 3 different hight, one on both sides and maybe one behind.
The Arduino will read the values continuously and will send smoothed data to the computer after every second.

Wednesday 18/2

We figured that the circuit we build yesterday was designed for a DC-motor, and not for a stepper motor which we wanted to use. But we found a new circuit; http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/StepperBipolarCircuit with the H-bridge "SN754410NE". We managed to get it to work with one stepper motor and will try to run it with two motors at the same time.

Ubuntu was installed on the laptop we borrowed.

We decided to discard the idea with motion sensors to detect people since the ones we tried was to sensitive and had a delay of 30 seconds. Instead we are going to use the webcam and proximity sensors to detect obstacles and people.

Tuesday 17/2

Me and Erik begun working with the stepper circuit.

Stepper Motor Driver

IMPORTANT: PWM Input MUST NOT be higher than 240!

Monday 16/2

Today we actually started working with the project. We started working on the wheels and motor. Some problem arised deciding what h-bridge to use for the stepper motor. Stepper motor was chosen to be able to track JAMs movement.

We also hacked the motion sensor to be able to sense motions. Removed the speaker alarm etc. For some reason it seems to sensitive but we will look further into that.

Now we are leaving for a meeting with olof to get feedback on the initial design document.
Meeting:

Discussion about the pitch: Where should you use the robot? That will effect the development. Meet the robot one time or repeatedly. Make use of the supervisors, ole annika and markus.

Use of 3d printer: Olof will check it out.

We got a computer from olof.


Amir sent me a link: http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist/jal/DrivingBipolarStepperMotors.htm

Project plan

Version 2

Wendesday 11/02

The feedback from pitch.

Suggestions:
- Robot could help to interact with surrounding.
- Show photos directly to screen at party
- Ask people for a joke or funny sound and plays to others.
- Information device and engage people to communicate with each others.
- Concentrate on photos and being funny. Don't go in detail with all ideas.

Questions:
- Why would users like to been taken pictures? automated picture taking. no need to exchange pictures between each other
- What is the major design challange? meaningful confersation
- Parties and public fair, different amount for people: what does it do if all people have been contacted already?

Monday 9/2

We joined up in school writing initial design dockument and prepared the presentation for wednesday.

Look and Feel

Face:

• 2 eyes
• mouth - shape can be changed according to the mood
• LEDs behind the plastic allows the shape change
• play around with the color of LEDs

height: max 1 m

body:

• choose some warm color for body (Erik will choose the color :P )
  
• material: plastic looks better and feels warmer than metal
• print it out on 3d printer?
• advantage of plastic is that it's light-weight
  

Wednesday 4/2, meeting with Olof

Meeting with Olof today.
We want to discuss the following with him:

The purpose of the robot:
GPS could it be bought for the workshops?
A: No problem, send email to annika.
How much impact on the grade does the personality have?
A: Work with personality form a design. Try make it change it temper maybe.
Exhibition
A: May be outside, internet connection?
The prototype
A: Get feedback on the personality. Try jokes..

Advice about technology: Talk to Ole! We want to build this...how?
If Ole can't help us we can ask someone else, contact Olof.

Design Inspiration

Group meeting 1!

First group meeting.

We tried out the face detection that Steffen got working.
Things we need:

GPS module
PC
Batteries
Wheels
Microphone
Speakers

Parts of the project:
Personality, Interaction between robot and human
Build the physical thing
Learning the movement, database
Speach recognition and face detection
Combining those parts together.
Private web interface so we can control the robot, public web interface (streaming video from the robot eyes?)


To think about and to work with in the near future:
Purpose of it?
Commersial, marketing and use it as an survey?
Entertainment, tell jokes and make fun of people.
CameraBoy, taking pictures of people during parties and such?

Initial Design Document + Timeplan

Most important: Final project proposal, Thursday!

Libraries:

OpenCV
Sphinx
3TTS