The Virtual Pi Wars Results are now out and we are very pleased to announce Spot Puppy has been declared the judges total score winner of the 2020 Virtual Pi Wars Competition and came second in public vote for favourite robot. When we entered Pi Wars our ambition was to simply demonstrate a walking robotContinue reading “Spot Puppy Wins Pi Wars”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Spot Puppy can Walk!
I am really please to announce that we have met our Christmas target of creating a version of Spot Puppy that we can control via a Bluetooth controller to navigate around a simple set of obstacles. All of the core components (servos, camera, time-of-flight sensor, accelerometer, battery, Arduino Nano, OLED and of course the Pi)Continue reading “Spot Puppy can Walk!”
Learning to See
We have started working on the head for Spot Puppy and although the design is still very basic, we now have the basic structure to work with. The head contains 3 components an OLED screen to bring Spot Puppy’s eyes alive, a Pi Camera for computer vision processing and a Time-of-Flight sensor to calculate distancesContinue reading “Learning to See”
Learning to balance
It is mid November and everything is starting to come together for Spot Puppy. The legs are now attached to our first generation body and the addition of an accelerometer has allowed us to develop an active balance system as you can see in the video below. We still have some problems with servo shakeContinue reading “Learning to balance”
Final Leg Design – We Hope!
After many iterations for our Spot Puppy leg design, which we documented in the evolution of a leg design blog post, we have finally printed a set of four generation 5 Spot Puppy legs which we hope will be the final design. The legs are printed on an Ultimaker 3 and we are using metalContinue reading “Final Leg Design – We Hope!”
Simulator for Gait Design
To help with the development of our control library and in particular the creation of different gait routines (walking, trotting, running, etc) we decided to develop a simulator to capture the control signals from the control library and visualise them on a screen. This resulted in a much quicker development cycle as the impact ofContinue reading “Simulator for Gait Design”
Evolution of a Leg Design
The leg design of Spot Puppy has already gone through a significant evolution based on iterative experimentation and learning. The early versions were design to be extremely light as shown in the picture below. This consideration was mostly due to our concerned about the available power of a micro servo. However after early testing itContinue reading “Evolution of a Leg Design”
Introducing Spot Puppy
Spot Puppy is a quadruped robot inspired by the Boston Dynamic’s Spot Mini robot and built specifically to take part in the PiWars 2020 Competition. Spot Puppy will contain three servos per leg, as shown in the conceptual pictures below. One for outward motion at the hip, and two for forwards and upwards motion atContinue reading “Introducing Spot Puppy”
Spot Puppy Robot for PiWars 2020 