Posted 02/16/16

Wall-E2, my 4WD wall-following robot, is doing pretty well these days.  He can navigate autonomously around the house quite nicely, and almost never gets irretrievably stuck. Up until the addition of front wheel  guards  a couple of months ago, Wall-E2 was quite adept at literally climbing the walls and winding up in the ‘scared tractor’ (from ‘Cars’) pose, or turning himself completely over on his back. Since then he has been much better behaved, but has still managed to very occasionally get himself into trouble (he has, on more than one occasion, managed to hang himself on a loose power or data cable, kinda like a horse rider getting scraped off by a low branch.  When this happens, Wall-E2 winds up on his back with his wheels spinning uselessly in the air.

So, my new ‘great idea’ is to give Wall-E2 a sense of direction, literally.  About 5 years ago I ginned up a pretty cool helmet-mounted attitude sensing device for my dressage-riding wife using a ‘Mongoose’ 9DOF board from CK Devices (I would post a link, but I don’t think they are being made anymore – see the Sparkfun ‘Razor’ IMU instead).  Anyway, I still had this miraculous little board hanging around, and decided to see if I could integrate it into Wall-E2.  The idea is that if I could detect an incipient ‘scared tractor’ event, I could short-circuit it by stopping or reversing the motors, or maybe taking some other action if that didn’t work.  In addition, I’m thinking maybe I could use the gyro & magnetometer sensors to have Wall-E2 report his current magnetic heading.  If I were to couple this with left/right/front distance readings, Wall-E2  *might* be able to determine where  he was in the house.  And, if he could do that, then maybe he could tell when he was close to a charging station, and hook himself for a quick electron meal (charging station yet to be designed/implemented, but hey – one thing at a time!)

So, I dug out the Mongoose board, and tried (unsuccessfully) to remember how I had gotten the darned thing to work 5 years ago (I can’t remember what happened 5 minutes ago, so 5 years was more than a stretch!).  Fortunately, I never, ever, throw files away (disk storage being effectively infinite, you know), so I was eventually able to track down my old Arduino ‘Motion Tracker’ project and bootstrap myself back up.  I did have a bit of a kerfluffle when I couldn’t get my Mongoose board to talk to the CK Devices Visualizer program, but that got solved after some head-scratching and a few emails to Cory (last name unknown) of CK Devices.

Using the very nice Visualizer program, as shown in the movie clip below, I was able to verify proper Mongoose operation.  I was also able to track down my old ‘Motion Tracker’ program (basically a very rudimentary hack of the ‘base’ Arduino program supplied by CK Devices) and verify that it still worked.  The next step(s) will be to figure out how to mount the Mongoose on Wall-E2, and how to integrate the IMU information into Wall-E2’s operations.

Stay tuned!