Summer Break!

Finally on summer break so now I can focus on building Titan and getting a job to fund Titan :)

An unfortunate incident

Unfortunatly, a little gremlin has decided to corrupt my HDD just enough for windows to no longer load. Which means all my work is lost. So I am starting again only this time I am using Ubuntu 12.04 to write and run my code. Hopefully this way the data is cleaner and I can use a more direct approach for interfacing it with my arduino. Wish me luck

Time to build

Majority of the software is done now. All that's left now is to design and build the thing. The design sketches will be uploaded here once they're done. During this time I will also be calculating a bill of materials so I can get a better estimate of the cost, so if you could spread the word that would also be great. See you soon

IT WORKS !!!!!!

IT WORKS !!!!!! After all this time I finally have a working demo of the software working. I ended up using Adobe Flash CS5.5 with the NETLab toolkit to get everything working together. I have two servos moving to the up and down movements of my hands but once you get one working it's dead simple to get the rest working.

Kinect Tracking

Got the kinect tracking running so I must be doing something right. Now I need to get that data sent to the arduino to move a couple of servo motors.

Titan Robot

Right, a little background. I am a university student in the UK but I have loved robotic's all my life, so when i find out that we get roughly a year and a half on our final project I was overjoyed and started making plans immediately only to discover that the university picks the topic subject. So I decided to do this project anyway which is why you are reading this.

The project as you might have guessed from the title is going to be a big robot. It is going to be a 5 1/2 - 6 foot tall rescue and recon robot. Tri-tracked base and a humanoid upper torso and arms. Imagine the Johnny 5 combo kit here only 15 times bigger. Anyone with a functioning upper body will be able to operate this as the main controller will be the XBOX 360 Kinect.

The "chain of command" on the robot is:

You wave at the Kinect => Kinect tells the computer what joints are moving => computer tells the Xbee radio to tell the other Xbee radio what is happening => the other Xbee tells the host Arduino what is going on => the host Arduino tells the corresponding slave Arduino what is happening => the slave Arduino moves the right servos => robot waves

If you want to follow the project on twitter @TitanRobot. You can also email me Titan.Robot@gmail.com

See you soon.