Christmas robot event day 2

Day two is at another bigger mall in Hong Kong. There aren't any games as such like day one. Robots are dancing and the Japanese robots cheer up the kids with very creative dancing and with eyes popping performance. The kids are all running around happily and screaming as they get their Christmas gifts from the robots. I must say the Japanese dudes are very creative in keeping robots entertaining as well as giving them a distinctive personally.


This is a picture of the Japanese dude preparing a rocket which will be launch by his robot to deliver a wonder gift to a lucky kid in the crowd.


The man in the picture is keeping the eager kids at bay as they wait for the rocket launch.


Here are robots from local school kids dancing.


My robot dancing before it's arm came off as it doing hand stand!


Here are some of the robots present on that day before the dances. The purple one is a Chinese made robot.



Here is a group photos with the Japanese dudes who are also the builder of the RoboOne champion "The Monster"

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Christmas Robot event in Hong Kong

Just came back from a robot event in Hong Kong. The brilliant robo one champion "The Monster" is here. The servos are super strong. It is able to push a basket weighting over 5kg. I put up that video later.



Here is a photo of some students participants.




Here is a photo of me winning some prize. First and second.


Here are my robots.



Here is Jeffrey's latest robot "The TimeMachine"



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Christmas MMA Robots

The lads are dressed up ready to having some fun. Check out the video below !



Knight Templar Xmas 2010 Preparation

The Knight Templar brothers are in the same video for the first time. The 'I' does not have any arms because I am waiting for AX18. It is walking very fast and stable in compare to the 'II' because the 'II' is top heavy and overall much heavier. The 'I' 's gait is very much better also. If i speed up the servos in the 'II' the foot will just be sliding and robot become unstable.

I have several choices to improve on the top heavy long leg Knight Templar II.

1. Lower the legs and the CG. The problem is the knee gets very hot.
2. Put a smaller battery but I have many big battery from my TREX450. And the Knight Templar II is very power hungry.
3. Remove the extra elbow servos but I really want it to do MMA.
4. Lower the foot servos. But the feet is not design for that.

So now I just wait and get by with a not so super fast robot but ok to do normal stuff.

Here in this video, I am featuring the improve robotask program which nicely fit all the motions into the control.

The history DARwIn and RoMeLa

The Bioloid Darwin will be available for retail for the first time in a couple of weeks. I must say I wasn't too excited at first until I ran into some old youtube video below.



The Darwin project starts in 2004. Then the Darwin IIa in 2005. Prof Dennis Hong gave the presentation below with Darwin doing amazing thing even in 2007. That was three years ago I cannot imagine how much improvement is in the 2010 version.


The Darwin uses LabView as a platform. As the video say it should allow easy programming to a layman like me.



I am overly impressed with how we can interact with the robot and its ability to play game. The Darwin can communicate with human with sign and play the game of dice. This is a very big step toward human talking to us in a house, able to understand voice and playing a game of e.g. chess or boardgame with us in the future. It opens a whole new door toward having a truely human like robot companion in the house, talking to us, doing things human do and help us. It seems Romela is setting a very solid platform toward this direction.



I did some digging to find out about LabView. It seems to be a window based application that uses graphical interface for programming. LabView makes parallel processing easy. I guess we can run LabView on a PC then tether it with our Bioloid.


The long presentation by Professor Dennis Hong.


The Darwin use feedback from the servos for walking and hand shake. The Bioloid Premium has sensors and gyros but they are not ultilise enough. I am very interested to see how Romela is able to better ulitlise the sensors and perhaps teach us how we can apply this to the Bioloid Premium.

Knight Templar II Explain

Here is the list of parts you can order from the shop if you want to build something similiar.

FRS-B-RX24F - Dyanmixel RX-24F Robot Actuator x 12 
M-300-B-FR07-H101K - RX-24F/M-300-B-FR07-H101K Hing Frame Set x 10 
M-300-B-FR07-S101K - RX-24F/M-300-B-FR07-S101K Side Frame Set x 12 
CM-700 - CM-700 Robotis Servo Controller x 1 
LN-101 - LN-101 USB Downloader x 1 
AX12+ Servos x 6 
Zig Bee remote and receiverSome plastics brackets for the arm 
Custom made feet, and body plate. (You can find information on this from the other post in this blog.)


Then basically you just spend like 30hours screw the whole thing together.


P.S. The right knee servo is having noise as you notice from the video. This servo is the most heavily use since it start walking with the right step. I will take apart the servo and hopefully put some lubricant to see if it solve it. It is nolonger loose anymore. I hope nothing permanent is done to it. If it is then I will swap with it with the left arm servo

Knight Templar II Karate

This is a short clip with trail made using iMovie 11. In this clip I am exploring jump and turn which does not seem very effective. There are also some Karate moves. This robot is design having martial art in mind. Hopefully I can make some really good KungFu stuff later. The walking gait is 100% self made. I can improve the speed and stability.