Servo - February 2010

The

Bioloid Premium Kit

It’s time to start your own robot evolution.

Recently, I had the opportunity to review ROBOTIS’ latest offering: the Bioloid Premium kit. I have spent many years building my own robots. A few years back, I discovered Robo-Cup and noticed that nearly all the leading teams in the humanoid league were using ROBOTIS servos or Dynamixels. After studying the Dynamixel’s capabilities, it became apparent to me why they seemed so popular in the collegiate circles. Dynamixels are intelligent servos that can be daisy-chained on a high speed serial bus. Each unit is individually addressable with its own ID. They can be configured separately, sent individual commands, or several can be synchronized with a single command. ROBOTIS provides detailed specifications of registers and the communication structure of the Dynamixels thus enabling others to easily use these building blocks to create and program robots of their own. The Bioloid platform provides an excellent opportunity for learning and entertainment to those that are just starting out and also to those who are already seasoned roboticists. In this article, I’ll cover details of the hardware and assembly in the new kit, and in a follow-up article I’ll cover the new software ROBOTIS has included.

By Rob Farrell

Mind

The new CM-510 controller is the brains of the robot and it has some very nice improvements over the original CM- 5. The CM-510 is based on the ATMega 2561 which is virtually identical to the CM- 5’s ATMega128 except it has 256K bytes of Flash instead of 128K. This means more room for firmware, motions, and tasks. In fact, ROBOTIS has partitioned the Flash memory to have twice the motion pages as the CM- 5. The CM-510 also has six general-purpose analog input ports. The 5V output will allow sensors that have high current sources such as an LED illuminator in an IR reflectance sensor to be switched off when not in use to conserve battery power. It can also be used to light external LEDs. The analog inputs are keyed and clearly marked as to their port designation.