Marty the Robot – Programmable walking robot for kids | Hacker News Reader

Marty the Robot – Programmable walking robot for kids

indiegogo.com

32 pointsnottombrown15 comments

I've known the developers behind Marty for years - and this is an incredibly well-engineered bipedal robot! With onboard WiFi or an RPi; and Python, Scratch, C++, ROS - it's a bit like the Turtlebot for humanoids.

Fun fact, back in March I had the pleasure to share the stage with a handful of Martys at the Edinburgh International Science Festival dancing away...

I bought an mBot kit to make with my 6 year old cousin recently. It was fun, but the default software was pretty limited, and the scratch programming environment was not actually that easy to use for a beginner. Had to drop into C for any sort of multi-tasking, and the documentation was mostly in Chinese.

Marty looks great, backed. Looking forward to playing robots in 2017!

Hey, another Robotical engineer here, thanks for your support!

We're planning (read: really want to but might not have time to do everything initially) to target a wide range of programming environments, with Scratch as a really basic level; This would make Marty a kinda smart toy, being able to do logo-like things but not much more. The more complex approaches will of course allow a lot more to be done with Marty.

The control board itself is going to have a fair amount of smarts, with an ARM cortex M4 - but that'll be running our firmware, so playing with that would require somewhat in-depth mbed experience. We'd expect most people to use the i2c or serial interface to hack with Marty, by writing their own code on a microcontroller, RasPi or BeagleBone, and packing that in with our board. As it's all open source, adding to the firmware will be possible, just not the most beginner friendly thing.

As for the WiFi functionality, we're looking at the ESP8266, (not final but unlikely to change) and building a C++, Python and ROS (http://ros.org, serious robotics stuff, very cool) set of APIs to use with Marty.

tl:dr; Two types of control, _standalone_ with an added raspi/arduino/other microcontroller, and _wifi-connected_ to a program running on a computer (scratch, python, C++...)

Google is working on similar concept. But Marty is more advanced with 2 legs. Educational toy market combined with programming is drawing lots of interest as a trend. https://goo.gl/photos/cogjHRCsm11RJaad8

Anybody have more info regarding the control board?

Hey there, Robotical developer here!

What would you like to know in particular?

Edit:

To add more generic info, as it is shown in the video we have quite a few prototypes and we are now working on the final design of each piece of hardware (including the control board).

Hi!

I read the description (did not watch video) and wanted to know more about the actual hardware (chip used, GPIO, power consumption, etc).

Project look great, btw. :)

I wrote a bit more detail here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903939 but

Still very alpha, specs currently are STM32F446RE (ARM M4), ESP8266 (WiFi, for control from a computer, phone...) and an accelerometer on-board. 9 channel servo control with current sensing, JTAG/USB for programming, i2c and serial interface for talking to it from an arduino, raspberry pi or other microcontroller. We're not expecting to have much GPIO free, and as I said, the firmware it's running is kinda complex, so we're not expecting most people to change it.

How much weight does the frame support? Does the weight need to be centrally located? I'm thinking this would be very nice with one of those small touchscreen displays attached to it.

It's fine with a reasonable amount of weight - I'd have to ask Sandy how much weight Marty can take before he physically can't move, but a touchscreen should be fine, and won't disrupt his walking ability much. Of course you could re-plan his walking with the weight taken into account, but that's quite complex. We'll probably have standard mounting holes on top of his head, so should be a nice and easy hack :D

If you keep answering I'll keep asking! :)

How many degrees of side-to-side motion can the frame take before it falls down? I'm thinking of getting two of these, putting a touchscreen on each one, and having them play joust. The objective would be to touch a dot displayed on the other players touchscreen. The things I come up with...

Well I like the sound of getting another one...

By side-side motion I'm guessing you mean a tipping force - and the the answer would be that he's pretty hard to shove over, at the limit of his lean he's stable, 10 degrees tilt and he'll fall. From fully upright, you need a bit more of a shove - having just pushed one over. Sandy says they can tip themselves if you wobble fast enough.

We're guessing you were thinking of something like this --> http://i.imgur.com/Cmmwu5A.jpg

Yes, exactly. This platform is very affordable and would make a great introduction to a sumo-type robot competition using bipeds. But not shoving robots around a la RoboOne, but hitting a target drawn on a touchscreen. Its something Ive been tinkering about for a while.

I appreciate the answers. Best of luck with the project!

Hey, just to follow up, we've added a graphic to our indiegogo page with a render of the control board that's currently in development, if you want an idea of what it'll probably look like.

Yes! Ordered for my kids (a.k.a. myself)

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