How to start in Robotics and FAQ

In various Facebook and

robotics

groups, including my own page, Robotics Learned By Building, there have been countless posts from people who want to get into

robotics

, their questions and posts have been confusing mainly because they don't understand what they want or what the what do they want. I'm trying to do now I was there many moons ago and a lot of these people are like I'm very young and they're in a part of the world where they simply don't have access to or can afford the technologies commonly used in robotics. Get it, I was in a poor family when I

start

ed and things like the Arduino or there microcontrollers like the picture didn't even really exist to confuse the topic even more.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become so common now that people outside the robot. in the world of robotics and I want to enter, I think it is an easy part, maybe even necessary, so I thought I would prepare this video to show you in a practical way what you can do to get

start

ed in robotics and dispel a lot of confusion and misunderstandings about what you need in knowledge and in some parts. Well, let me start by pointing out how I got started in robotics. This video will be primarily aimed at those who simply cannot afford to purchase electronic devices or electromechanical parts or do not have access to those things.

I started out in Hubbell, but I'm glad I followed this path now as my family was poor at the time. I was 9 years old and my parents gave me a game for Christmas. precision screwdrivers I'll be honest when I first unwrapped it I was very disappointed. Turns out it was one of the best gifts I got with that precision screwdriver set. I was able to begin disassembling electronic and mechanical devices. that I collected mostly from the trash I went to the dumpster and specifically looked for electromechanical devices and disassembled them for the frying pan. I kept two parts.

I kept everything from the motors, the mechanics, the circuit boards to the screws and the plastic panels of the body of the device, the plastic body panels that I would cut later and use as body panels or structural components for the robots I would build. In fact, I ended up using those precision screwdrivers even as drills because I didn't have a drill and couldn't. afford it and the cordless drills that are so common today didn't exist back then, so the more electromechanical things I picked up and took apart, the more parts I had available and robots almost build themselves now, while many computers like Arduino are great. are so common among robotics discussions that it feels like you have to have one to build a robot controller.

That's not true. I've built many robots over the decades and only a couple used a computer of any kind, the series in fact. Of the underwater robots I built all had a cable going to the surface for two reasons: one, if something went wrong, I wanted to be able to return my robot to simplicity. Yes, you could put a microprocessor on board; It wasn't necessary later when Arduino arrived. It was quite revolutionary, literally revolutionary because it took very complex microcontrollers and made them simple and available to the average person. Arduino boards can greatly expand what you do and how you do it, but they are not necessary to enter the field of robotics. you can get started in robotics, you can get started in robotics, as I did with old scrapped machines and electronics, old picture tube televisions and microwaves, which I would recommend you stay away from for now, as both have a component electronic called a capacitor and they can hold a high voltage charge for months after you have unplugged them, even when they are unplugged you can get a serious electrical shock if you don't know how to deal with them, like getting a shock from a TV you were working on , it was actually an arcade machine, you know, that used one of these big picture tubes and I don't know how many volts hit me, but it was right in my chest and it threw me back about three feet, the only reason it didn't I went further was Because there was a concrete wall right behind me, stay away from tube TVs and microwaves.

I was finding machines in the dumpster that don't really exist anymore, machines like dictaphones that had long, threaded drive rods. I'll show you how to make them yourself. with common parts easily accessible, some of the best machines for parts were the old VCRs and photocopiers, usually the bigger the better, the more electromechanical parts they had, large photocopiers, some even have air cylinders and small compressors. Laser printers are not bad, as they are a Like a small copier, your typical bubble jet or inkjet printer usually has a few parts that you can use, but usually not many, usually one or two motors. drive and a stepper motor.

Discarded cordless drills or screwdrivers are great for robotics. I'll show you why. later, but if you find a cordless drill that was discarded because the battery no longer held a charge, for example, get it now first. I would like to explain to you what you should focus on learning and why the most common questions or calls for help. See the remote control involved in building an armed robot or a flying robot. My online course series that I call robotics, learning by building, is actually set up in the sequence that I recommend learning. I developed that sequence over thirty years of teaching at a science camp and at a high level. school here in Ontario, when I went to university to learn robotics, it was a whole year before we saw a robot, we spent the entire first year learning electricity and electronics, digital electronic programming, math and physics, and I agree with your plan educational, electronics.

I learned during that time that it has been the most valuable asset of everything they taught. I have used that knowledge extensively over the years. The second year of university was very hands-on working with real industrial robots, programmable logic controllers and industrial machines, but most of what I learned. I learned that the second year was quite specific to them, to the machines we were using and most of them I had never used in the industry. We were never taught skills like prototyping. I was self-taught in that skill both before and after college and artificial intelligence. It didn't really exist then, ASEA had just released an aerial vision system that could recognize basic shapes on a conveyor belt to discover the true orientation of parts for example, but it was slow and clunky, but here's my video series on line. courses that are available on Jetpack Academy Comm and I set them up this way because I recommend learning in this order.

Course number one was on analog electricity and we chose chronicles. We start from scratch, assuming you know nothing about electricity or electronics. We present the basics. They are quite important and you will use them non-stop throughout your life with robots, we build a lot of electronic circuits and learn basic machine control and power control, we even experiment with bionics, the second course is digital electronics, we learn first what digital is and then We started using small microchips called microcontrollers or embedded controllers which are effectively a small computer on a microchip. We start with a microchip called a pic microprocessor and do a lot of real machine code to learn the language that microprocessors use and why they use that language in At science camp we use vic-20 computers.

I'm dating myself. We move on to the venerable Arduino. The Arduino Tsar. Very nice and easy to use microcontrollers with a lot of support because all the software and hardware is open source and because you are effectively programming in the C programming language, it is much easier to program the machine code from there, we learn to program various digital devices , such as screens, digital motor controls, Reed sensors such as temperature or position, and yes, we even make our robots dance a little. The third course is the course I'm working on now, which is robotics and physics units.

Physics and robotic drive mechanisms are so closely intertwined that they are practically the same topic. We learn all the different types of mechatronics we can use to make a robot move. and how to use those mechatronics DC motors AC motors Stepper motors Brushless motors Hydraulics Pneumatics and simple machines that become critical in robot design Of course, the fourth course will be prototyping This is not a topic that you will find in college or university until your third year and this is a critical skill that I learned on my own, you will notice it in my personal story, this is where I started.

I didn't understand how the different types of DC motors worked or how to use them, you can't just stick a wheel on a DC motor and expect it to move your robot or so I learned the hard way because that's what you learn in the course three, that's the physics you need to learn, so I learned things backwards in my life, but in this course I learned a lot of skills and tricks of the trade of designing and building machines from scratch, including to design them so that they can be produced in mass. We take all the skills we have learned in the courses so far to design and build a 3D printer.

Printers are effectively a robot and once you have built one you will also be able to design 3D printed parts for any other robots you want to build, of course five bits will be what we call autonomous robotics meaning these robots are on their own in some aspects. way of making decisions or even us doing remote repairs like what Jet Propulsion laboratories did with their Mars rover, the robot was on Mars and they fixed it from Earth, how did they do it? In that course, you will cover various navigation methods in which the robot has to navigate known or unknown terrain, either along with your instructions or completely on its own, we learned how to capture and use GPS signals, ultrasonic or laser detection of the surroundings or even use digital cameras to identify objects and navigate or manipulate.

It covers some basics of artificial intelligence, so the questions I see asked by those interested in the topic are pretty consistent. Question number one, how do I get started? I hope I have answered that question. Start with the sequence I just recommended. I need to know something about computers or electronics or artificial intelligence to start unfortunately what I see in many of the questions and objectives that people have is a hodgepodge of a lot of very complex topics and in fact I don't want to criticize because Robotics really involves a range so diverse of topics and experience, which is probably why I liked it so much and it's nice to have these goals, but you need to break them down into separate smaller goals, which brings me to the second most common question or request. help I see I want to build a robot to learn a simple task Artificial intelligence or machine learning has become such a common topic and often associated with robotics that many newcomers are under the impression that it has to be learned or that it is a part clue.

From learning robotics nothing could be further from the truth Most AI and machine learning are never used with robots in any way The vast majority of AI and machine learning are used in computer programs for things like recognition facial or pattern recognition to interpret handwriting instance or perhaps voice recognition now, while it is perfectly understandable that someone would want to learn these topics and I congratulate them for that, they just need to understand that there is a clear dividing line between A.I. and robotics, they are two completely separate Epics and they are both very complex just building even a simple robot is already quite complex and difficult, but the moment you use that word learn to describe your robot, you are adding a huge field of study, very complex and completely separate, you are talking about very, very advanced robotics, now you can.

Don't let me or anyone else tell you that you can't learn it or even implement it directly in your own home or store. You can do it, but just understand what you're getting into. You are trying to learn two completely separate fields of learning. To study both, which can be university courses in themselves, you also need some pretty serious hardware to do any type of AI. It can be done on small processors like the Arduino, but Arduinos are so limited by the power of the processor that it is much more complicated. It is more practical for you to make decisions for the processor early and effectively, simply schedule a series of checks and actions.yes/no based on sensor information.

You will notice that most people who learn use very powerful processors like Google's AI. learning system, you are actually using Google's latest generation processors, which are some of the most powerful on planet Earth. You need that processing power, so what are you going to do? Tying a big, fire-breathing desktop computer to your robot's voice commands and voice recognition is an example of AI. It can be done on a home robot, but it is very complicated and requires not only very high processing power, but also huge databases. That's why voice commands on your smartphone will only work if the phone is connected to an Internet connection - somehow your smartphone is not powerful enough to get the job done or store the huge databases.

You are transmitting a recording of your voice to a computer far away that has incredible processing power and a huge database with which to interpret the sounds. Hopefully to make some sense of what you're trying to tell it, so even voice commands are incredibly complicated to incorporate into a robot, we would normally do this in some sort of hardware hacker where we use open source speech recognition like CMU sphinx. or okay Google, which uses powerful external servers, yes, I just activated my phone. Okay, Google, thanks. Wow, it's not for nothing that they say Canadians are polite now.

I can't stop this. It's Google, they're spying on us, so we use it. Open source speech recognition like CMU sphinx or Google, which uses powerful external servers over the Internet that our robot communicates with, our robot would need an Internet connection of some kind, effectively transmits the speech sound file that you want to interpret and the speech recognition server returns the words in text format. We have programmed our robot to search those words for specific keyword commands or instructions which it then acts on so you can see. We've avoided the need for a large, powerful server computer in our robot, but we've also completely separated the robot from the artificial intelligence because the AI ​​is happening on a large, expensive server in cyberspace and we don't even see it or understand what it's doing. or how you're doing it, so now a lot of newcomers come to robotics with this impression that they can build a robot that can learn to do something, yes it can be done, but understand that it would take years of design, testing. building, refining and rebuilding to get even a very simple robot to do the most basic things and it would take incredibly powerful power. processor, as well as a lot of very advanced programming and an incredible amount of complex mathematics to learn anything, understand that even just building a simple little armed robot that sits on a desk and moves according to how you flip some switches and control that little project could take you hundreds and hundreds of hours of work to build and you will most likely have to build several versions before you get one that works.

It is simply electrical and mechanical. Yes, it can be done and it can be done at home using the simplest method. With very limited tools and resources, you can do this, which brings me to my next FAQ. I need help building an armed robot. This is an excellent starting point. Kudos to those of you starting here, that's where I started now as long as you can use. Hobby servo motors like the ones used in this fancy armor or weaponized robot I got from banggood.com, the problem is that hobby servos are generally very weak, the motors on this robot spend most of their energy just holding the robot under its own weight, these also greatly restrict the size of your robot and in addition you may not be able to buy hobby servos for one reason or another and this video is dedicated to those of you who do not have access to such things .

The first thing I would recommend is to look at the previous ones. The designs form a Google image, search for industrial arm robot and examine the images to see what you can learn about the arm designs that already exist. In fact, I got to see the first computer-controlled industrial robot when I was a teenager, the Asiya. IR b6, which is actually one of the robots I trained on in college. I also have an industrial robotic arm. It is a classic Spanish robot from the 80s that was built in collaboration between Fennec and GM Automotive. It is almost identical to the design of the IRB Six.

Let's take a look. Take a quick look at the design because we can quickly learn how it works. There are two ball screws on the back, one that drives the robot back and forth at the waist and a second that pulls the back end of the arm to raise and lower it properly. On the other end, you can make a quick and dirty screw by simply using a threaded rod. I bought some nuts at the hardware store and as you turn the threaded rod, the nut moves up and down with incredible force. Connect your load to the nut. which runs along the rod in my demonstration for my robotics units in the physics course, you can see that I have actually locked some bearings in the rod, those bearings are roller skate wheel bearings, very common and easy to find , so now you just have to take a slice. of wood or plastic with a hole drilled the size of the outside diameter of the bearing and you can use a screw or bolt to lock the bearing in that bracket and then mount the bracket in the space of your robot's arm, for example, while I have a gear . nut lock here for a demonstration of one way to drive the threaded rod, you can hack a cordless screwdriver or better yet a cordless drill, simply tighten the chuck over the threaded rod and voila, you have a threaded rod now you really can't see. the base rotation unit on my fanuc robot, although here is a picture of the bottom of the robot, it uses a special type of drive motor called an ac servo motor and well its quite technical and complicated and my third course actually shows you ways you can hack a common brushless DC motor into an AC servo motor using some high power transistors and a humble Arduino Uno microcontroller board, you can immediately start to see the need to learn electronics and digital electronics to know even what I just said there, but again, this can be learned. at home at your own pace to rotate your robot base.

I would recommend a worm gear of some type or perhaps a hobbyist servo that has a good worm gear. Some classic helical gears. This is a huge worm gear motor that I ripped off from a scrap copier, it's a DC motor, but the motor is at right angles to the drive shaft, the output drive shaft, which is almost guaranteed to be a gear helical; However, another common hardware trick for a motor is a windshield wiper motor or electric motor. A car window drive motor looks a lot like this actually or you could hack various mechanical toys out there to rip off the drive mechanisms on them, accumulate these parts and grab all the mechanical devices you can and once you have a reserve on hand, design your new one.

The robot revolves around using the parts you have. It's inspiring and incredibly helpful. Gather a stockpile of electromechanical parts. The next frequently asked question: How do I make an RC controlled robot? This is a good thing, a bad thing, remote control is generally divided into two categories, infrared or radio control. It would include things like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi under the radio control. Infrared is great, except it's practically line of sight, you can just bounce the infrared light off walls and turn corners, but in the end it's pretty limited to hack the remote. Controlling from an old TV or scrap VCR is one way to do it if you can separate the infrared receiver board from the rest of the electronic components, which you often can't do.

Radio control can be done from scratch at home, but it is very difficult, you would have to have a ham radio license and follow the laws and regulations of your country. Hacking the radio control of an RC toy of some kind is the way to go if you can't afford RC equipment, but RC radios and receivers have arrived. The price is so low that it is literally worth the money and hassle to simply buy an off-the-shelf system rather than trying to build one to save money. I understand that you are trading time for money, but in this case you can easily do it.

Spend hundreds of hours designing and building an RC system that could work. Question number five. I want to build a flying robot. Usually these people are referring to quad rotors or commonly called drones. It's great that you want to do this and I think you should do it. but this comes back to radio control and the problems there and, furthermore, flying machines of any type consume an enormous amount of energy, this requires quite careful engineering of the electronics, a very powerful but lightweight power source, i.e. a lipo battery or gasoline engine driving the generator and some kind of complex control system, whether it's an on-board computer or radio control, or both, all of these things are very difficult to hack.

If you are making a multi-rotor, for example, it is very important that all your engines are identical, otherwise controlling the aircraft becomes very, very difficult because one engine will be more powerful than the others, so you will want to flip the aircraft. The motors must be very efficient, which is why drones almost always use brushless DC motors that require a complicated controller. There are many reasons why people simply buy these off-the-shelf controllers instead of simply manufacturing them. There are also many reasons why people simply buy these brushless DC motors instead of making them themselves, and these motors are usually quite expensive, so yes, it can be done. but you will probably end up spending a lot of money since each of these parts is expensive to buy and very difficult to hack or build hardware from scratch.

Well, I've talked quite a bit, I hope this has been somewhat helpful and not too discouraging.