For the robot project I am using a MotorHawk board, which essentially provides motor control over USB.

Unfortunately the code that comes with it isn’t that great. I knew it was Windows only from the start, but when I had a closer look, it comes with a DLL, and sample applications in managed VB and managed C++.

If you’ve ever looked at managed C++ coming from a non-managed C++ background, you will know how ugly it is. I was not even able to get the project to build. So I set out with a couple of hours to get something nicer sorted out so I can hook it all into ROS eventually and get some real automation going on.

My final year at Uni is well underway and therefore the Final Year Project must also be on its way.

This year my project is individual, and entitled Project Origin (named, if you must know, over the book forced upon underlings by Stargate’s Ori). Cryptic indeed.

In terms of actually doing things, check out the dedicated project website for more information. Here’s an excerpt from the Overview:

Project Origin aims to implement a robot system that uses the Xbox Kinect device as its primary sensing mechanism.

The Xbox Kinect is a cheap and highly effective sensor, integrating a RGB camera, depth perception system, and 4-device microphone array. While a lot of amateur and some academic work has put the Kinect to use, it remains to be seen whether the Kinect is the device to take robotics which aim to interact with our environment to the next level in terms of both sensing complexity and cost effectiveness.

This afternoon, our robot project was supposed to have a demo. What actually happened was that we talked about it, switched it all on, and then it never moved. The demo was scrubbed, and fortunately this year did not count for any marks – otherwise we would have ended up getting very low numbers.

So why did a project which had been working so well fail so brutally? It was not a failing of the robot, nor really a failing of any one team member (although the fact I got the configuration wrong and failed to realise in time was the cause of the issue). I’m going to attribute this one to bad planning and last minute work.

This is the final post in a series detailing the development of the ARNIE robot.

In this post, one of the brain systems entitled BrainJS is described.

PYT is a minimum jerk trajectory computer and executor. It is part of the ARNIE robot’s brain architecture, which I will go on to explain here.