a slew of ArduinOculus boards awaiting firmware (zoom)
Today we shipped out a bunch of our ArduinOculus boards to those who pre-ordered them; they should reach their destinations in a week or so.
They’re pretty useful boards, especially if you’re making a USB powered robot a lot like Oculus, with two DC gear-motors for differential steering, and a servo for camera tilt (or sword slash, or trigger pull, or whatever nefarious task you want your robot to perform again and again…).
They can be programmed using the Arduino IDE. We’ve pre-loaded them with the Arduino Duemillenove bootloader and the default “blink led 13” firmware.
For a starting point on programming for your own project, feel free to take a look at the Oculus firmware code, which has a good basic command set.
Our kickstarter campaign, launched back in December 45 days ago, finished with an incredible week, and pushed us well above our target. We’re pleased, to say the least. Thanks again to all of our supporters—we will be contacting those receiving product from us ASAP, to gather necessary information.
We weren’t sure if kickstarter would be the ideal venue to launch a product like Oculus, but it went well, and really, the press coverage alone would have been worth the effort.
To fill the void (now that we have no kickstarter web stats to obsess over any more) we’ve enabled our online store. We’ll be adding the OcuLED lights accessory for pre-order pretty soon, as well as RoboRealm CV software. We’ll also add automatic shipping calculation for non-US/Canada destinations as soon as we can; for now, please just contact us and we’ll promptly supply a shipping quote and process your order.
UPDATE Feb-2-2012: International shipping is now enabled in our online store
We’re stoked to have recently acquired an ASUS Xtion Pro Live 3D sensor, which is ASUS’s version of the Microsoft Kinect. The Kinect has caused an explosion of innovation in the hobbyist robotics world over the past year. The ASUS Xtion sensor is an improvement from a robotics point-of-view, due to its smaller size, lighter weight, cross-platform open API, and USB-only power requirement.
We’ve only had it for a few days, but here’s what we’ve come up with so far:
We made a simple mounting bracket for now, that is a swap-in for the regular periscope bracket. The Asus sensor snaps into it, and is plugged into a spare USB port.
(zoom)
We made a basic Oculus module for ROS, the open-source Robot Operating System, running on Linux. Using the Rviz 3D visualization tool (included with ROS), we can get a look at what Oculus is “seeing”, in 3D model space.
(zoom)
For a quick demo we came up with a “radar” widget for the Oculus remote-control web-client. The window in the upper left (above) shows a top down view of what the sensor is scanning, in the horizontal plane, to a range of 3.5 meters. To code it, we used the java wrapper to the OpenNI API that came with the sensor, to extend our Oculus server software.
We would probably expand on this with future software updates, giving Oculus more autonomous navigation capabilities, including room mapping and obstacle avoidance.
To see it all in action, check out the video below:
We’ll refine the design a bit, and have some sort of Xtion mounting bracket available as an option in a few weeks, along with a software update including basic Xtion/Kinect integration … for those who want to seriously kit out their robot.
We’ve received some good press over the past few weeks, mostly from the tech news blogs, helped by the Kickstarter launch of our Oculus Robot. Here’s a shortened list, of some of the higher traffic sites:
UPDATE 1/27/2012: another good writeup surfaced at businessinsider.com – “Normally, it would cost thousands to buy a robot with all the capabilities that the Oculus Robot has.”
Above is our prototype, hand-soldered light circuit that served well, and stood up to abuse for a couple months. We’re now confident that the design is sound, so the next step was to design a production circuit board:
We’re sending this PCB layout out to get a prototype made. The board is 100% Arduino compatible, communication and power is supplied by USB, and the circuit allows fine-grained intensity/dimmer control for the high power Cree-LEDs.
