The RS robot made its first appearance in public at the Embedded Live show at Earls Court last week. It's still a work-in-progress as you can see, but is now mechanically complete and has its wheels. In the picture Simon Morisson of NeuroRobotics is just making sure for the nth time that the power supply connections are the right way round! The robot is lifted clear of the ground on four supports to allow testing without it running off.
The EDP platform which forms the heart of the electronic control system is shown clearly here. There are four dual-channel motor control modules mounted on one EDP baseboard driving all 8 motors. These modules provide a Microchip dsPIC microcontroller for every motor and handle all the low-level position and velocity control loops. A master processor then sends high-level movement commands to these modules via an I2C serial bus.
