Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

Yeah...looks good and was working. Why did you switch?

....you have a lot better music! We just have lame background noise in ours.

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

Yep...will drop it to your email in your profile. Give me a couple of days if you don't mind....catching up on the other non-FIRST part of life....

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

The 16 analog inputs are on the RC. Section 9 (page 8) talks about those. Here is the RC paper from IFI: http://www.ifirobotics.com/docs/rc-r...-6-13-2006.pdf

Here is a paper from IFI on the OI that will explain the use of each game port pin. From this you can see which are analog and which are digital..and which will light up LEDs. http://www.ifirobotics.com/docs/oi-r...de-1-30-07.pdf

Tables 4.3.1-4.3.4 cover the game ports.

In the paper I send it will have the pin-out assignments we used.

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

all right, thank you very much.

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

by the way, how did you guys decide to do this control system?
im sure some other teams with an arm thought of something like this but was there a person who researched and/or drew up designs to show the team that this was do-able?

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

Well....here's the story:
We had two joy sticks and found it was not very intuitive to control the arm segments, wrist joint, wrist rotation and turret rotation. The team did not have a lot of time to practice.....

At BMR Team 1138 (Eagle Engineering) was in the pit next to us. Their robot did not show up until 4:00 PM on Thursday (it was lost, not shipped, wrong truck, etc.). Their robot (when it did arrive) had a similar (without the turret) arm segments as our bot....and they used a joy stick. But...they showed us this OI with a small segmented wooden arm and pots on plexiglass that was manipulated by their fingers....that they had not yet been able to get to work successfully. On Saturday afternoon they got it to work.....and it was cool.

On the 5.5 hours drive back to Grosse Pointe from BMR I worked out a physical prototype in my head....knowing that most of the arm code was already in place from the PID control and the functions that the programmer had already written (good ol' modular code). During a fix it window we built a simple wooden prototype, attached pots and lots of loose wires back to the OI game port...and duct taped it to my son's (the programmer) arm.

The prototyped proved to be feasible.

In the next fix it window the build team constructed the arm, the wiring was done (good ol' LAN cables and modular connectors)....and it was tested....the pots tweaked...and tested...and tweaked...and tested...and finally passed the tests to be called 'good'.

So..we gained inspiration from Team 1138's concept and took it to the next level.

btw....a thank you email was sent to Team 1138 for their sharing and inspiration. And now... a public note of thanks: Thank You, Team 1138.

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

No problem, I'm very happy that control worked out for you guys, we were talking about this at BMR, awesome stuff.

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

A note on this for individuals who would like to use this or a similar idea in the future: one team in 2005 (I don't remember which) had an arm mounted controller much like this one. In order to get around "strap-in" time, they simply waited untill the beginning of teleoperated period to plug the arm controller into the OI - it's fine if you are wearing it during autonomous, as long as it is not connected to the OI! Plugging a DB-15 into the OI should take way less time (2-3 seconds total) than putting the assembly on.

Hope this will help people trying to use a control system like this maximize efficiency in the future!

//Dillon Compton

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

i believe the team you are talking about is team 25. they used an arm similiar to this in '05

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

very coool ... i saw this and it made me raise an eyebrow!

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

Wow, thats awsome, I would love to build one of those. Could I get the so called white paper?

Thanks

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

We did a similar thing called "the Backpack" a few years ago; we too were going to do that kind of arm control, but we decided not to later. Yours looks great!

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

In watching the championships...and the speeches/introductions.... There was this interesting human arm control that Dean and his team made for DARPA. 14 degress of freedom..if I remember correctly....

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

We takked a lot about whether having on before the match but not plugged in would be acceptable and decisded it wouldn't. It's great to hear that we can wear it and then plug it in after auton.

Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control
 

830 had a similar arm control system, we had a small miniature arm that controlled our main arm but we didn't get it working till waterloo. but it got us the xerox creativity award at waterloo :)