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Smooth Walker Group One Uppsala University Department of Information Technology Embedded Control Systems, spring 2009 Instructors: Prof. Alexander Medvedev, Karl Marklund, Romeo Buenaflor, Egi Hidayat Smooth Walker Group One Hanzheng Zou Hongyi Zhao Zhao Huang Zhiqian Yuan Abstract The goal of this project is to let the AIBO robot walk smoothly and have better vision ability. The standard gaits concentrate on effective locomotion but also result in significant displacement of the optical axis of the AIBO's head camera. Thus, there is a need for adapting a standard gait so that the head is kept as steady as possible without much loss in the motion velocity. Relevant software tools have to be developed. Acknowledgments We would like to thank the Seeing While Walking groups of year 2008 for their work and report that we could to some extent use in our work this year. We want to thank Professor Alexander Medvedev for the theoretical help and also for his ideas during the course. Mr. Romeo Buenaflor has helped us with the OPENR programming during the software development. Index Abstract ............................................................................................................................................. 2 Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................. 2 Index .................................................................................................................................................. 3 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 4 2. Project description ....................................................................................................................... 6 2.1 Goal ..................................................................................................................................... 6 2.2 Platform ............................................................................................................................... 6 2.2.1 Hardware .................................................................................................................. 6 2.2.2 Software ................................................................................................................... 8 2.3 Development Tools .............................................................................................................. 8 2.3.1.Tekkotsu .................................................................................................................... 8 2.3.2. OPEN-R .................................................................................................................. 10 2.3.3. Medit ..................................................................................................................... 10 3. Previous study ............................................................................................................................ 11 4. Experiments on AIBO ................................................................................................................ 12 4.1. Use MotionCommander to get the default gait ............................................................... 12 4.2. Design a New Gait with Medit ......................................................................................... 13 4.3. Evaluate body height in the Matlab ................................................................................. 14 4.4. Implement Java client for taking picture .......................................................................... 17 4.5. Message sending for controlling the robot ...................................................................... 17 4.6. Use Matlab to evaluate the shaking ................................................................................. 19 4.7. Use Camera to adjust the walking direction .................................................................... 21 5. Result .......................................................................................................................................... 25 6. Future work ................................................................................................................................ 28 Reference ........................................................................................................................................ 29 Appendix A: Camera Vision while walking. ................................................................................. 30 Appendix B: New Gait Parameters ............................................................................................... 31 Work division Hanzheng Zou: Chapter 1, Chapter 2.1, 4.2, 4.5, 4.7, Chapter 5, Chapter 6; Hongyi Zhao: Chapter1, 2.2, 2.3, 4.1, 4.3 Zhao Huang: Chapter 2.1,2.2, 2.3, Appendix Zhiqian Yuan: Chapter 3, 4.4, 4.6 1. Introduction AIBO (Artificial Intelligence roBOt) was one of several types of robotic pets designed and manufactured by Sony. From 1999 to 2006, there have been several different models designed. The AIBO robotic pets are considered to be autonomous robots, since they are able to learn and act based on the external environment, even from other AIBOs. The AIBO robots are able to walk with its mechanical legs, recognize some spoken commands, and "see" the environment via camera in the head. Because it has a computer, vision system and articulators integrated inside, but much cheaper than other conventional research robots, AIBO is used in numerous research areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Real-time and Embedded Control System. RoboCup (Originally called as Robot World Cup Initiative) is an international competition founded in 1993 .It is an international research and education initiative. It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined, as well as being used for integrated project-oriented education. For this purpose, RoboCup chose to use soccer game as a primary domain, and organizes RoboCup. The goal for the RoboCup project is to create a soccer team of autonomous robots who can beat the FIFA world champions by the year 2050. AIBO robots were earlier used as the official robot in RoboCup but have now been replaced by a new type of robot since Sony has discontinued the production of AIBO in 2006. And the research about how AIBO can play soccer better is still valuable for the future's robots research. A programmer's kit for ‘non-commercial’ use was released by Sony. The kit has now been expanded into three distinct tools: R-CODE, AIBO Remote Framework, and the OPEN-R SDK. These three tools are combined under the name AIBO SDE (Software Development Environment). All of these tools are free to download and can be used for commercial or non-commercial use. Since the first release of OPEN-R, several AIBO programming tools have been developed by university labs, including URBI, Tekkotsu, Pyro and Cognitive Vision. In this project, OPEN-R is mainly used. The Uppsala University gave the first robot course using the Sony AIBO started from the early spring 2004. And each year several groups worked on the AIBO projects to achieve certain goals to contribute on the robot research. This report presents our project, named “Smooth Walker”, which is done during Embedded Control System course in spring semester of 2009. The project’s aim is to create an approach for the dog to walk steadier than it usually does, and also to build a method for us to evaluate the new gait. The gait is required to be fast, straight and steady like nature dogs. Then it can be used for robot soccer game. There are several challenges such as how to create a brand-new gait from scratch, how to compensate the mechanical error of the dog and how to evaluate the gait. We will talk about the solutions we created for these problems later in this report. Among all the available development tools out there for AIBO, we choose OPEN-R to be the development environment. We think it’s the most powerful one and give us the ability to tweak the dog for advanced functions. We also use Matlab for gait evaluation and MEdit (a tool from Sony) to emulate new gait. 2. Project description 2.1 Goal The project is called Smooth Walker. As you can see from the project name, it aims to let the AIBO robot walk smoothly and directly. The goal of this project is to let the AIBO robot walk smoothly and have better vision ability. The standard gaits concentrate on effective locomotion but also result in significant displacement of the optical axis of the AIBO's head camera. Thus, there is a need for adapting a standard gait so that the head is kept as steady as possible without much loss in the motion velocity. Relevant software tools have to be developed. * Tools for on-line estimation of head shaking. * Tools for automatically adjusting a gait in order to minimize the shaking. We observed the standard gait via recorded video clip frame by frame. We found that the shaking is caused by the robotic gait, which can let the dog walk but not natural and smooth at all. After a little investigation of the OPEN-R SDK, we think it possible to create a brand-new gait, which we can take fully charge of all parameters. Thus we plan to create a new gait to weaken the shaking of walking. We also encountered an issue that the dog won’t go straight even if the gait is totally symmetric to z-axis due to the mechanism
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