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Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

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Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#41

Post by michaelt »

Torkel wrote: post #37
fake-name wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A brushless motor with an encoder and a feedback loop is a servo . It's just not a crappy integrated RC model servo motor assembly. The (ab)use of the term "servo" is a major pet-peeve of mine.

Sure. I should have written "rc-servo". But in this context it was not ambiguous and the point stands - anything that uses rc-servos is a dead end. Personally I'm also skeptical of series elastic actuators - it seems like a half-assed solution where the proper solution is to embrace full direct-drive digital control of electrical force conversion.

The "problem" I've seen with a lot of walking robot projects is, where an RC car needs 2 motors and a quadcopter 4, most "interesting" walking robots need 12 - which means they instantly have to start making compromises due to cost and weight.

This robot ain't exactly large - but it's already needed $450 worth of Dynaixel AX-12A servos.

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#42

Post by wlll »

jcelerier wrote: post #40

this seems pretty much a copy of the Metabot: http://www.metabot.fr/ which is also open-source and has existed for more than half a decade

There are a whole load of very similar looking robots out there, an image search for "quadruped robot" or "hexapod robot" will yield loads of them.

It's great that someone is getting into robotics, but this does have the vibe of someone over-selling a hobby project.

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#43

Post by wlll »

Torkel wrote: post #19

It has the wrong kind of motors to be interesting. Servos are a dead end, imo. The interesting robot projects now are the ones embracing brushless motors with encoders and dynamic walking gaits. It’s the same components that are used in drones.

I'm interested in Robotics (I made a simple ping-pong ball collector a while back https://sendcat.com/dl/D9DI15MAOjhKMFJYLJLADj64ywyU2qGWaKMSl...). Are there places I should go or things I should read to find out more about the latest developments in robotics in general, or the use of brushless motors with encoders/dynamic walking gaits specifically?

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#45

Post by fho »

michaelt wrote: post #41
Torkel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I should have written "rc-servo". But in this context it was not ambiguous and the point stands - anything that uses rc-servos is a dead end. Personally I'm also skeptical of series elastic actuators - it seems like a half-assed solution where the proper solution is to embrace full direct-drive digital control of electrical force conversion.

The "problem" I've seen with a lot of walking robot projects is, where an RC car needs 2 motors and a quadcopter 4, most "interesting" walking robots need 12 - which means they instantly have to start making compromises due to cost and weight. This robot ain't exactly large - but it's already needed $450 worth of Dynaixel AX-12A servos.

We have a hexapod (18 Dynapixels) at work ... apart from giving demos to visitors it's not used at all. Gait patterns and (inverse) kinematics are a solved problem ... dynamic gaits are becoming more mainstream now, but those require motors that are reasonably backdrivable. Maybe the Dynapixels can be configured to do that, but I think the high gear ratio will prevent that.

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#46

Post by taneq »

outworlder wrote: post #21
Torkel wrote: post #19

It has the wrong kind of motors to be interesting. Servos are a dead end, imo. The interesting robot projects now are the ones embracing brushless motors with encoders and dynamic walking gaits. It’s the same components that are used in drones.

Why are they a dead end?

IMO the only inherent issues with hobby-style servos are lack of feedback (force and position) and lack of direct torque control. The rest of the complaints are features of all cheap positioning elements and aren't unique to hobby servos.

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#47

Post by taneq »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #6
zxexz wrote: post #5

Cool project! Code is quite easy to follow, IMO. Somewhat off-topic, but I find the name somewhat amusing. I would never seriously hold a name against a project, but I’m always curious when one is named something a bit...edgy, without an obvious reason - and at the expense of making it harder to find!

On the front page at the moment are projects named: Bear - minimal blogging platform - it's a play on bare Venom - all terrain quadruped - snakes are all terrain? Zoox - self-driving-car tech - half the other self-driving-car companies have nonsense names Facebook - I still find this a smart name for the service Looking Glass - 3D display - confused me for a second with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Glass_ser…

I think a lot of the SV/YC/"Startup" things deliberately choose nonsense names because it will make it "easier to pivot" when they decide that actually AI middleware for generating Hawaiian shirt patterns is a dead end and they should be making a cloud service for taco recipes instead.

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#48

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

wlll wrote: post #42
jcelerier wrote: post #40

this seems pretty much a copy of the Metabot: http://www.metabot.fr/ which is also open-source and has existed for more than half a decade

There are a whole load of very similar looking robots out there, an image search for "quadruped robot" or "hexapod robot" will yield loads of them. It's great that someone is getting into robotics, but this does have the vibe of someone over-selling a hobby project.

Yeah the front page definitely tries to sound like they just invented the quadruped.

I’m all for people getting into robotics, but I’d much prefer a more natural/honest intro to projects like this. “I saw all these cool quadruped projects and wanted to make my own to learn more about them”.

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#49

Post by Torkel »

wlll wrote: post #43
Torkel wrote: post #19

It has the wrong kind of motors to be interesting. Servos are a dead end, imo. The interesting robot projects now are the ones embracing brushless motors with encoders and dynamic walking gaits. It’s the same components that are used in drones.

I'm interested in Robotics (I made a simple ping-pong ball collector a while back https://sendcat.com/dl/D9DI15MAOjhKMFJYLJLADj64ywyU2qGWaKMSl... ). Are there places I should go or things I should read to find out more about the latest developments in robotics in general, or the use of brushless motors with encoders/dynamic walking gaits specifically?

Nice build :) Have you checked out EasyEDA + jlcpcb? It can improve the electronics aspects of robot projects.

I searched a bit now to see if any new projects have shown up. Came across this one: https://hackaday.io/project/167845-mjbots-quad Could maybe be interesting, but I haven't looked into it.

Here is a chinese motor manufacturer that makes more sane motors: http://www.gyems.cn/product.html

Getting a drone or gimbal working properly from scratch is a lot of work. And these dynamic walking systems are more complex endeavors because there is less info out there. So I would recommend to find some project with people who seems talented and has a nice atmosphere and then get building :)

edit: Ratholed on this, here is a nice blog with inspiration (scroll for lots of awesome) https://build-its-inprogress.blogspot.com/

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#50

Post by KineticLensman »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #12
lsc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I don't really care about 'edgy' but it bothers me that so many projects, especially when those projects are computer commands, are hard to search on. Like, ss or ip. I mean, in those cases, they're central enough to my world (I'm a sysadmin) that it's worth just memorizing to the point where I rarely need to look it up, but looking up an 'ip' command is way harder than looking up an 'ifconfig' command. Not every…

This is where it’d be great to be able to limit the context of a search. IP but not Intelectual Property SS but not Secret Service

In DuckDuckGo:

    IP -"Intellectual property"
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