Getting Neko back and forth across the country proved extremely difficult, so I've been rebuilding him at half-size. In the process I decided to add a gyroscope (measures tilt about 3 axes) to the accelerometer (measures static and dynamic acceleration, due to gravity and motion respectively) and ultrasonic sensor (measures distance to the nearest object by emitting an inaudible ping, and timing how long it takes to bounce back). In Neko's first iteration, I had the accelerometer on the shoulder joint, telling those motors to keep the arm generally upright. I had the ping sensor on the wrist, telling the shoulder motors to keep the brush at the right distance from the canvas. The wrist motors moved the brush back and forth as the elbow motor moved from the top of the canvas to the bottom. The shoulder had continuous rotation servos, all others were standard servos.
For half-pint Neko, all the servos are continuous rotation. I was aiming for uniformity, and the ability to scale up to stepper motors if I rebuild the robot at full-size. The accelerometer will tell me pitch and roll, but I need pitch and yaw. I think a gyroscope can fill the gaps. I got some trusty-sounding advice from
r/robotics on sensor placement, and now have everything mounted together. I'm still pretty confused, and scared of whatever
Unscented Kalman Filtering is, but I'm making progress. My current technical difficulty is that I don't know how to use the gyroscope in Python (the
Prototyping library is extremely limited, and not really meeting my motor needs either), and don't know how to log data without it (Firmata seems deprecated).
