Robotics Society of Southern CA Meeting 5-11-13

CSULB Engineering department building, 302

Minutes : Doug

 

Class : PID, by Alex

Alex gave a thorough overview of the concepts of PID, and then talked about some changes that he had made based on his experience in control systems. One of these is a feed-forward term, and he also covered some nested PID control topics.

Here is a link to the presentation. Alex corrected the block diagram of the trapezoidal speed generation routine, which is actually simpler than the one he showed during the talk. The code is from the firefighting robot that he used in the contest and is almost identical to the code in Leaf’s microcontroller.

 

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Business Meeting

 

Upcoming Classes (11:00 – 12:00)

 

Upcoming Competitions:

June - Hallway Contest (2013 Draft rules for New Hallway navigation contest.doc)

July - Road navigation contest. As proposed by John, a course with parking spots and roads will be created on modular shop floor mats. More details coming soon.

 

Announcements

 

Walter mentioned an article in Robotics Trends where RSSC had participation. You can read about it here.

Martin mentioned the RCX expo, where he is hosting an antweight robot combat contest. For more information, see http://www.rcx.com/show-information and the e-mail posting here : (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/RSSC-list/message/2336 )

 

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Walking Contest

 

Rules - See this link

 

Entries

 

Jim 4 by Jim 6, by Jim

 

Lady Stryker, by Martin

 

Escape, by Ron

 

Lego, by James

 

Nicola, by Walter

 

Woody, by Doug

 

Son of Dan, by Dan

 

Scores

 

Winners

First Place : Dan, for entry "Son of Dan". Dan received the Zumo Robot Kit, donated by Pololu. Thank you Pololu for the wonderful donation!

 

Second Place : Jim with Jim 4

Third Place : Ron with Escape

 

Video

 

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Show and Tell

 

Martin

Martin showed a game that consisted of two robot lightsabers controlled by arms made of 4 robotis servos, a CM-900 board, and a Wii Nunchuck. The goal is to knock of your opponents dolphins or skunks, or whatever stuffed animals you prefer.

 

Bill

Bill showed the BeagleBone Black. It's a $45, 1 GHz CPU, 512k mem with HDMI, USB, Ethernet, 92 IO pins (including ADC) . You can program it as a linux machine with a monitor and keyboard, or you can connect it to your computer and program it through your web browser. You can read all about it here : http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black . It has several advantages over a Raspberry Pi for only slightly more money.

 

Carl

Carl showed an Arduino Uno with a Wifi shield controlling a servo. The servo can be operated over the internet. You can see more about his project for tele-operated toys at http://www.teletoyland.com/.

 

Sergei

Sergei demonstrated some C# code that he had written/modified for PID loop visualization.

You can download his code here : File 1 - Sergei201305_TestPID.zip (192K), File 2 - Sergei201305_WheelPowerCalculator.zip (346K)

 

John

John showed an aluminum Raspberry Pi enclosure that was manufactured locally (in Temple City area, I believe). Unfortunately I misplaced the link. Cost was around $35. For additional info please try asking on the mailing list.