Post GenCon report!

The robot ran at GenCon, getting in about half a dozen full charge cycles in over about three days before it was past the point where I could keep it going. Ultimately while it did succeed at the goal of entertaining others and myself, the performance and reliability weren't quite what I had hoped.

As I'd expected, all the reliability problems were with the servos. Unexpectedly, I didn't have a single gear failure. No stripped or broken teeth on any of the gears, and even the issue with the press-fit third gear coming apart that I'd seen early on one servo during testing didn't come up. I did have failure of the mounting tabs on three of the servos. The plastic web where the servo mounting tabs meet the cases is very thin on these servos. These mounting tabs can take the loads created by the servo torque, but the bending and twisting forces induced by the way all the forces from each leg are transmitted through the servo mounts appear to be more than they can take. I had servo mounting tabs break off on three servos, and so far have found cracks in the case of one more servo.

I also had motor failures in two servos. In both cases while walking the robot suddenly lost all power, apparently due to the overcurrent trip on the battery protector board. In both cases once power was cycled one of the servos no longer functioned, not even in the passive motor-braking mode the servos default to on powerup. I had thought it due to controller board failures, but on disassembly and testing found both motors had failed open. I haven't taken apart the motors to find out while they failed yet, but I suspect heat-induced failure of the connections to the brushes, or the brush holders or springs.

I had expected these servos to have a high failure rate, and designed the robot for easy access to the servos, so even with the high failure rate of these servos I was able to keep the robot working until I ran out of unbroken servo cases. I wasn't happy about having to repair the robot as often as I was having to recharge it's batteries, but I wasn't completely surprised.

The bigger problem was the poor control I had over the robot's motion. The lifelike movements people like about the robot, and the ability to make fins and subtle movements to interact with the crowd, depends on the servos closely matching the movement of the joysticks. On that this version of the robot failed. First of all, the precision of the HX12K servos is utter crap. There's a huge amount of play in the geartrain, which combined with a badly tuned control loop in the servo control board means that the position signal you're sending to the servo is going to be treated as at most a rough suggestion as to the position you'd like the servo to hold. There's a huge amount of overshoot and ringing, the robot's legs wandering and shaking randomly even when sent a steady position signal. Standing still with all four legs on the ground the robot would be stable, but it would shake uncontrollably when holding a leg in the air, and walking was jerky and unsteady. It was a goods thing thing that the ability to invert the legs and walk either side up was always a crowd favorite, because the robot would frequently fall over while walking.

The other problem was that the radio link, which worked fine at home, was unreliable in a convention hall full of cell phones and other electronics. Control was unpredictable - sometimes it would work fine at up to 30 feet, sometimes it would intermittently lock up at less than 5 feet.

I'm also not happy with the Wii Nunchuk joysticks. I just don't get the same fine-control ability as I had with the RC airplane radio set I used to use.

The radio range issue can be easily corrected. At the moment I'm using the 1mW version of the XBee radios. The Pro version of the XBee radio has a transmitter power of 60mW. More power might be the brute force solution of the problem, but that's fine with me. I also have some ideas for rebuilding the controllers with better joysticks stripped out of an old RC airplane set.

The control issues with the servos I can't do anything about without replacing them. Poor position-holding seems to be an unsolvable issue with the MG995/HX12K servo. I suspect that even if I transplanted the control boards from the HS-5645MG servos in my junk box the insane amount of play in the geartrain would prevent them from being accurate enough for my needs.

Some of the more astute of you might wonder, if I've got nice high-quality Hs-5645MG servos in my junk box, why am I wasting my time with cheap import crap like the HX12K? It's because the HS-5645MG gearboxes kept failing. The HX12K servos, for all their faults, at least have bulletproof gears. I may try rebuilding the robot with my old HS-5645MG servos anyway - the spring shock absorbers I built into this version of the robot's legs may be enough to save the gears from failing. There is also a new servo out, the TowerPro MG996, which is an upgraded version of the MG995/HX12K servo with better accuracy and reliability, which I might buy and try out eventually. For the time being my budget is shot and my wife's patience with robots that break after a minute of walking is expended, so buying any new servos will have to wait.