RK01 humanoid and ROS

asked 2016-10-31 06:22:06 -0500

Stokastik
1 ●1 ●1 ●1

Hey ROSflolk, I'm interested in using ROS with the new RK01 humanoid robot. RK01 is a new cheap chinese humanoid robot, it's very cute and seems to have a lot of sensors. Is someone interested in my collaboration for this purpose ?

RK01 robot

RK01 is similar to nao except it's lower performances, an ARM (Mediatek MT6472 SoC architecture) processor and for the fact it has no hands. I had mine for only 410€ including port from shenzen. My RK01 is provided with a dirty android distro and poor software functionalities and I wanted to install ubuntu ARM and ROS to get either my c++ tool chain and ROS to do funky things with it. As I said RK01 have a lot of sensors and communication devices (GPS, GSM, Acelerometter, magnetometer, temperature sensor, proximity sensor, PIR sensor, IR I/O, 2MP camera) All it's servos have odometry caps ... RK01 is definitely the low cost nao/qrio ... Waooo, Keep calm ! It remains a real bottleneck with RK01, it have only 512mo of SRAM !!!

The best way to get ROS working on RK01 is probably to install linux on it, like for RPI boards, we will have acces to all the packages we need. Installing ubuntu along Android can be a bad idea due to the low amount of RAM and for the fact we could not have easy access to native hardware. The best way could be to install directly linux on the ARM computer (an Cortex-A7, Mediatek MT6572). From now, I investigate on the way to do so. If someone want to join the effort ...

Cheers,

Marco

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answered 2016-12-17 05:05:48 -0500

madmarc
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I played a little bit with my RK01 and it was somwhat frustrating ...

Sensors not working Can you confirm the sensors of your RK are working ? (GPS, Accelerometer, magnetometer, proximity sensors, IR) I could not get any data from these sensors. If only mine are not working, I'll not be able to teach him something more. Even simple remote control of the robot could be difficult to implement without any sensor data (except for the camera).

ARM Software In order to facilitate access to the ROS plateform it would be great to get onboard a real linux OS, an Ubuntu one would be perfect. Ubuntu ARM exists for RaspberryPI with access to complete ROS packages and linux libaries. But for now I was not able to simply change the rom image with another mtk6572 Android ROM (in order to check sensors).

Electronics I opened it sometimes so I'm interested in your knowledge about the RK01 ins and outs. I compared camera and display port and it seem very different from those of the RaspberryPI. The underlying idea was to replace the board with somewhat more powerful and open source. But in this way we simply loose alla the mtk6572 onboard sensors, and probably to camera and display ...

Lack of Apps RK01 lacks in dedicated android apps. Some are in Chinese. Some are not working.

Maybe I'll try to cook an alternative Android ROM or get access to sensors data in some way. It would be great to have an RK working on its factory board. Here we need an Android expert :/

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i really dont know what software is used to program its micro controller and i dont know what the name of the micro controller is called all i see are labels on the board where the sensors go. its programming needs tweaking. right now i get a message that reads "unfortunatley childloc has stopped".

Reybiker1 ( 2016-12-18 17:10:25 -0500 )edit

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answered 2016-12-16 13:27:40 -0500

Reybiker1
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I have an R K01 I have customized it with a 4K security cam I am interested in collaborating ideas in the specially working together to mature this dumb robot I am too trying to reprogram it's software. I have disassembled and reassembled the robot successfully so I know the ins and outs of it.

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