| Work on Bing has gone a little slower than
expected the last few weeks, but I'm not terrified about that
yet. I have been focusing completely on getting Bing's
frame made -- which for now means building Bing's upper legs
and working on the design of the body. One of the upper
legs is essentially complete and the second will be ready
soon. The project summary on the main web page shows
that everything else is drastically behind schedule, but
that's ok for now. Next week maybe I'll readjust the
schedule to take this reality into account. Now I'm
looking at late January or so for Bing to be completely
constructed and the basic software getting sensor data and
communicating with the PC host. That leaves plenty of
time to teach Bing to see, feel, and walk. Gulp.
Heh. I hope.
Regarding Bing's body, I have come to realize that I will
not be able to design it completely right now; there are too
many unknowns. But I have a basic idea in mind which is
enough for me to get started.
My biggest concern right now is that Bing might end up
being too tall, despite efforts to keep it small. It
shouldn't be a problem to keep it barely under the 31cm height
limit for the Trinity contest, but the rules state that when
operating, no part of the robot can go higher than 31 cm and
I'm worried that Bing will rise slightly as it walks. So
I'm going to be scrambling to figure out how to cut an inch
off its height (which won't be easy). One possibility is
to build my own universal joints to replace the ones I'm using
now at the ankle and hip... that would be a complicated
piece of work but I don't really see any other place I can
cut.
In other news, I have yet again started rethinking the
vision system; now I have no idea what I'll end up
doing. All of the components are up for grabs. I
still have about two weeks to figure it out, I guess.
I took a bunch of photos while building the upper leg, and
have compiled them into a little pictorial essay, which the
interested reader can view by clicking
here. A word of warning: because of all the
pictures, the page will take a while to download. |
