orpheus robot

About

This robot is designed to participate in an event like the Six Can competition created by the Dallas Personal Robotics Group. An earlier version of this event was referred to as Can Can Soccer.

Orpheus was a legendary musician, poet, and prophet in ancient Greek religion and myth (from Wikipedia). Can-can was known as a high energy dance in France in the 1800s. The Infernal Galop from Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld is the tune most associated with the can-can (from Wikipedia). Sure, its a stretch, but "orpheus" is a great name. Plus, it would be awesome to have this robot play that musical score while its collecting cans.

My plan is to focus on specific portions of the design:

ability to securely grasp an orange can
a mobile platform that can move the gripper around
motion control and odometry
a method to find orange cans from a distance
an overall program to find cans, take them to the goal, and seek more cans

Follow along with the updates here on this site as the development of this project continues!

Updates

January 3, 2015

Another trip to MakerLabs yesterday yielded a new set of acrylic gripper parts, with previous design issues fixed. I made some servo linkage from .047" diameter wire stock from the local hobby shop, and in one end made a z-bend in one end for the servo horn. The other end is somewhat-secured using heat shrink tubing. Not sure if its strong enough though. Next step is to wire up the microswitches and servo to a microcontroller and create some test code. Then I can run the thing open and closed to see how effective it is for picking up cans.

December 28, 2014

Went to MakerLabs today to laser cut my gripper prototype. The parts came out great however the design needs some improvements. First, I somehow managed to plan out the smaller top/bottom gripper parts to be the wrong size. Maybe they got scaled incorrectly in Inkscape when moving things around; no idea what happened. Anyways, the other thing to change is the mounting for the servo, the holes are too big. Also want to have the base extend further towards the gripper, to provide a "backstop" when capturing a can. But I can do some more testing with this prototype over the next few days, so it was worthwhile making it.

December 27, 2014

I emptied and washed out a couple of soda cans a few days ago, found the correct brand and color of tape at Canadian Tire, and taped up one can according to the DPRG construction guide. I'll tape up the second can soon.

I have an initial design for a gripper to catch the cans. I'll be visiting MakerLabs to laser cut this prototype from acrylic tomorrow.

License

Credits & References

Link to the DPRG Six Can rules.

Video of the DPRG December 2014 Six Can event.