BowlerStudio: A robotics development platform

This robot was generated by BowlerStudio based on a simple slide-bar style interface. The robot parts were generated an then sent to my 3d printer and printed out. I assembled the robot and used BowlerStudio to calibrate it in about an hour (full assembly and calibration in that time). Then i just give the command to walk with the game controller and away it goes. You can see the live 3d visualization of the robot on the screen behind it. Notice the way all the legs are all swept back or forward, that is a trick i figured out to use cheap servos and distribute the load across them. most hexapods do not do this because the control math would be much too difficult. In BowlerStudio, it starts with the math solved, then generates the robot that implements it.

In htis video you can see the process of going from a designed robot to a 3d printable parts file. It shows you how to generate parts, and the file structure of where the parts are placed.

This week we took BowlerStudio on the road. We taught a class of 15 students ages 9-14 years old, kids programming. We went through variables and functions by making calls to JCSG. The students made each step in their own Github Gist, so that have a step by step record of everything they did. We used the history to show them how to find changes and differences,and to look at what they had done. To check their code, they would run it in BowlerStudio and see the 3d shapes start to appear on the screen. They each made a little R2D2 model and then attached that model to the walking robot and was able to drive it around! I have no pictures because of rules involving kids and pictures, but they all made it through and got hier robot modeled and driving from source code in 1 week of 3 hour sessions.

Neuron Robotics Cooperative is a worker owned enterprise that designs and deploys robot controllers to make the process or building robots easy. While i understand that is a bold statement, we have built software based on top-tier research grade and medically certified robotics control platform, and added an easy to use and learn application interface, BowlerStudio.

To that end, the DyIO and BowlerStudio should be concidered as one project, seperated out here on Hackaday.io for the purpose of making each easier for members of the site to understand.

That said, we have already begun using this robotics design platform as a way to teach kids programming, and keep their attention from day one with robots! We use a Java based platform to teach programmatic CAD, and then attach that CAD to kinematics models and let the kids see each step of the way what they are creating. The Dyio takes that excitement out of the computer and brings to life the printed parts that the students generated. We see this platform solving the large air-gap in the learning process between introduction to the concept of programming and building robots, and the final satisfaction of having actually created a robot. By closing this gap it is easier to keep up the excitement for learning, and increasing student engagement.

Basically it makes learning fun again because robots are inherently engaging.

I *tried* to show everything in 2 minutes, and got a fast overview of the features. Needless to say many hours of video could be generated for this. We are very excited to be entered into the Hack-A-Day Best product and HAD Prize quarterfinals.

I have made a bunch of usability and performance updates. The first big one is the moving of Creature definitions into a git hosted file. this is neat because the config file has hyperlinks to its remote files to define its kinematic, cad and walking engine. this means the entirety of a robot, its cad, kinematics and run code can all be sent to another user in a ready-to-use form through a tweet!

As in, if you open this link:

https://gist.github.com/madhephaestus/bcb4760a449190206170

in BowlerStudio via Menu>Add Device>Creatures>FromGist...

you will get a robot, all cad generated, and ready to walk.

In the latest revision i have also added Clojure as a supported language, so all you functional programming purest can now use a Lisp to build robots.

And the last feature is invisible, but powerful. In the background all files are cached to the disk using Git and are being pushed to git when saved. I will slowly move all of the configurations into a specifically structured set of files that cna be stored if your personal git repo.

I am working on a feature where the DyIo stores a git repo URL as its "default" code, so a DyIOs code can travel with it...

I taught a 3 day intensive class with these 2 kids to learn basic programming and robot control. THey said they wanted to build a talking Yoda, so that's what we built! It started with one of the legs from the Hexapod got its back-bone ccontrol. THis gave them the ability to place Yodas head in cartesian space using a game controller. they then recorded those loactions ans synced it up with the Text To Speech synthisys of each of his lines. Last they made a function that automatically ran his mouth based on what they had him say.

Here is the code that made it go: https://gist.github.com/madhephaestus/9ad31af45be2c1230da0

if you open that link in BowlerStudio, and a DyIO connected, yoda will start talking to you too!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/neuronrobotics/wifi-dyio-robot-controller-w-24-channels

Our kickstarter for the WiFi version of the DyIo just went live !

I made a screen-cast video of adding and removing limbs with Creature Lab.

Hey everyone, we just got featured on Product Hunt, so if you think our project is cool, please upvoat on there so lots of people get to see it? http://www.producthunt.com/tech/wifi-dyio-kickstarter