Welcome

This blog details my finding in building and setting up a small web connected humanoid robot.
The first objective of this project is to fully control and monitor the robot from internet.
This will be done by adding a single board computer running a full Linux system connected to the Robovie Nano robot by the serial port and connected to the web by wifi.
Beside web remote control, I will take advantage of the complete Linux system to add some higher functions to this robot (environment analysis, navigation, speech & video recognition,...).

There are several constraints in this project.

At first a limited weight and space . The Nano is a very small robot and the available space is quite narrow (6 x 3 x 2 cm in the back) .
The added weight load must be under 100 gms (Linux board + battery + wlan+ audio + webcam + sensors ) if we want to keep fluid motions and good autonomy.
Due to theses constraints I have to work with a minimal processing power. I am using a Bifferboard from Bifferos running a full Debian Distro at 150Mhz.

The tasks and progress are:

Build Debian kernel & rootf : (done) Debian Squeeze with headers. Linux 2.6.32.2
Wlan (done)
Remote motions control (done)
Remote master slave control : (done)
Video streaming - 2 ways : (done)
Vision/Blob recognitions (not started)
Sound streaming - 2 ways (wip) - can play stream, can record sound
Speech Synthesis (done) - flite working well, espeak is choppy but still usable
Speech Recognition (wip)
Remote Sensors monitoring (done) Battery level, accelerometer, distance, temperature
Lcd usb display (done) - hacked 1.5" key chain
Oled i2c display (wip)
Auto charging (not started)

Friday, March 18, 2011

USB HUB & BIFFERBOARD

It seems that only the USB Hub pictured below contain a special chinese chip (some fe1.1 type ) that allow webcam streaming in full resolution with Linux.



With this hub , Mjpgstreamer and uvcstreamer work well in MJPEG (10 fps at 640x480 with my cheap and extra small webcam).
With other hubs, I have lower performances and can only stream in YUV.
For space reason I am going to replace this hub with  a common USB 2.0 hub, with a smaller pcb size 3 x 2 cm. I will still be able to stream in YUV at 5 fps which is enough for me now.

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