Hi Guys, so I have been away for a while now working on a really fun project inspired by Poppy. JoGo 2.0 is a 145cm tall robot with the same Ai engine that I showcased earlier on this forum on Poppy.
It is still a work in progress, I am about 2 months away from finalizing the prototype.
Here is a photo of the robot. I am happy to receive any feedback/questions on the project and if anyone would be interested in giving me some advise over a Skype call on the use of LIPO batteries, embedded electronics, and manufacturing advise.
As you can see from the photo below, the robot is pretty much redesigned from scratch except for the arms. But at the moment I am redesigning the arms from scratch and also redesigning the rest of the body so that you get a nice smooth finish to the actual robot.
Features include a built in microphone and a 7" screen in the head and I am planning to make a dark acrylic piece to cover the head.
FYI, this project so far is non-commercial, for fun only
Looks like an open Pepper
So, motors : Dynamixel MX ? Control : Pypot on Raspberry ? Do you have a repository ?
Your robot is a bit tall (145 cm high). It will be expensive with 3D print. 12 v Lipo battery are very common. What can be interesting is to have an embedded Lipo Charger.
@damiend thanks for the feedback. I agree with you, the spine is a strength point in poppy. That was a discussion point with me for so many months, I finally decided that I would go without it. So basically I just have AbsY and KneesY instead of all the torso motors on Poppy. If you look at Pepper, is it pretty much the same. One motivation was in terms of required functionality for what I want to achieve (a social robot), and second motivation was the cost, poppy has 25 motors and with JoGo it is down to only 12 (8 MX-28, 2 MX-64, and 2 AX motors).
Regarding the Ai part, it is fully interactive and integrated. I have not recorded anything yet, but check out my previous work on poppy. it will be somewhat similar, but I have had around 6 months to advance it more:
@juju thanks for the feedback. You got it mate, I am kind of trying to do something like pepper but with better Ai.
I am not using pypot, I pretty much built everything from scratch in c++, check out my reply above to @damiend with the youtube video link.
Regarding the batteries, as you can see in the photo, the robot is standing and pretty much self powered. So far I am using a 12V 9A SLA battery which is VERY HEAVY and it only give me about 2.5 hours of juice. I want to go with a 14.8V 40ah LIPO battery but I have no idea where to start and also I have no idea how to charge it properly. I need a small charger something I can maybe mount inside the robot and when I plug it in I just plug in a 220V line. All the chargers out there are universal and have balance charging capabilities and I dont even know if I should be balance charging or not. Do you know anything about this? For example does a macbook balance charge its cells or does it just apply a parallel chargin voltage across all of the cells?
Not a specialist, but what I know :
_ You need to balance the charge on each cell with Lipo
_ You also need to be careful with current apply to the battery.
