Demo Puppy

This is a fork of the demoPuppy which was originally designed by K. Dermitzakis dermitza. The original files are described on his website.

Modified files

New models were added which are compatible with the original models. They include

• Servo holders for cheap Carson CS-3 standard size servos
• Flexible legs which can be printed in one piece with flexible filament. We used Ninjatek's Ninjaflex.
• A one piece body unit which has the holes to hold a Arduino Mega
• A holder for the IMU "MPU6050" which fits to the one piece body

All included files can be 3D printed. We used an Ultimaker2.

The new models are included in the V5 pack. This configuration is shown in the following image:

Electronics

In our configuration puppy has an IMU and 4 servos for the legs. They can be wired as shown in the following graphic

• The red chip on the left is the MPU6050
• the red chip on the top is a voltage regulator. It should fit the requirements of the Servos.
• We use an Arduino Mega

Arduino program

The arduino program found in arduino/puppy_base is compatible with the wiring shown before.

Installation

Many parts of the program are identical with the code in the tinyIMU repository. This repository has a step by step instruction how to install the package which have to be followed to use this package.

Features

• The program is ROS enabled and can communicate to a ros master via rosserial
• The program reads the IMU measurements with a high frequency (~300Hz), and publishes a smoothed version at around 20Hz with the topic "\tinyIMU" and in the tinyIMU data type to reduce data traffic.
• The program subscribes to motor commands with the topic "\puppyMotor" and gives the corresponding PWM commands to the servos. The value range is between (-32768 and 32768)
• The program runs a diagnostic about the load percentage in it's loop and publishes it with the topic "\timing"

Additional repositories

• To transfer the tinyIMU messages to a standard IMU message the package tinyIMU_relay can be used. The package has a scaling feature to convert the raw values to ROS standard units.
• The repository smp_control includes configuration files for self exploration of this robot.