Category Archives: Robotics

Bigger Buttons for the Pololu Zumo!

Posted on January 25, 2019 by peter

The Pololu Zumo 32u4 is an excellent educational robotics platform, but its buttons proved difficult to manipulate for some of the students in my classes. I designed these bigger buttons as an add-on for the Zumo. My hope is that … Continue reading →

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ROS Melodic on Raspberry Pi 3

Posted on December 21, 2018 by peter

There is no build of ROS Melodic for Rasbian! There is no Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) Desktop build for Raspberry Pi 3! Now what? Here’s my answer: Flash an SD card with the Xubuntu image linked here (use balenaEtcher): ROS Melodic … Continue reading →

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Kuri Robot Notes

Posted on November 12, 2018 by peter

One of my colleagues had an interesting box, it turned out to contain a Kuri home robot from the shuttered Mayfield Robotics company. This post is a collection point for my notes on playing with it. I thought it might … Continue reading →

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Three-Robot Formation Localization

Posted on February 16, 2018 by peter

Visualizations of three-robot formation localizing using only range-only and range-bearing. I have recorded screencasts from Autodesk Fusion 360’s sketch view to help visualize the limits of the constraints. In the videos, the Hexagon represents a robot fixed at the origin … Continue reading →

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Manual Exposure Control of OpenCV Video

Posted on February 10, 2018 by peter

My experiments robot localization have been frustrated by blurry images. Blurry images have been making estimating the position of Aruco tag boards difficult with OpenCV. In my case, the camera is mounted to a moving robot that is photographing tags … Continue reading →

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Raspberry Pi Cheatsheet

Posted on February 5, 2018 by peter

Follows is a list of tips for Raspberry Pi setup and use. Direct Ethernet Connect Setup * Turn on my Mac’s Internet Sharing for the Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter. The self-assigned IP on Thunderbolt Ethernet is fine. Use arp -n -i … Continue reading →

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IR Serial Communication with Pololu Zumo

Posted on December 4, 2017 by peter

Inter-robot communication may facilitate interesting cooperative behaviors. The Pololu Zumo robot platform has no inter-robot communication facility as-designed.  I am interested in repurposing the IR proximity sensors and the IR illuminators to receive and send serial data. The following are … Continue reading →

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Three-Dimensional Aruco Boards

Posted on November 30, 2017 by peter

I am using Aruco tags to locate mobile robots relative to one another. I have mounted tags on the robots using cubes so that at least one tag will be visible from every side of the robot. In the picture … Continue reading →

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