Servo - April 2010

The Bioloid Premium Kit Wrap-Up

By Rob Farrell

In the February ‘ 10 issue of SERVO, I covered some of the exciting new features of the hardware components and the assembly of the Bioloid Premium. This part of my review may feel a bit like a tutorial. However, my intent is to touch upon some of the vast capabilities of the RoboPlus software, point out some of its key features, and perhaps reveal a bit of why it’s so impressive.

With the new Premium kit, ROBOTIS has released RoboPlus — a suite of PC software that includes RoboPlus Task, RoboPlus Manager, RoboPlus Motion, RoboPlus Terminal, and the Dynamixel Wizard. RoboPlus itself is a launch pad for these major applications, the user guide, and a link for ROBOTIS’ latest online technical support. The latest version of RoboPlus supports both OLLO and Bioloid, and it includes a third tab for “Expert.” The expert tab adds the Dynamixel Wizard and RoboPlus Terminal.

RoboPlus.

RoboPlus Motion is the new motion editor. With the motion editor, steps or poses are assembled into pages and pages can be linked together and repeated to form complex motions. Each page can contain up to seven steps and up to 31 Dynamixels. When the motion editor connects to the CM-510, it loads the directory of all the motion pages contained in Flash memory. Robot motion files can also be opened from a disk, in fact, several motion files and the contents of the CM-510 controller can be opened as tabs at the same time. For each tab or robot file, the pages are indexed in the left column followed by the page name, and next, the exit numbers. If next is nonzero, upon completion of the page the linked page will be played. Exit refers to the page that will execute when the robot receives an input from the RC-100 to execute a new motion. You’ll note the CM- 510 can contain 256 motion pages where the CM- 5 can only contain 128. Pages that contain data are green while empty pages show as white. Clicking on a page places the steps of that page into the next set of columns. Each step has a “Pause” and “Time” setting associated with it. Pause is a delay between steps and Time is the time to complete the step. Each can be adjusted by clicking to select a step and then using the sliders below to adjust the values. Right below the steps are the page parameters such as the number of times the page should repeat, its overall speed, a calculation for the total page time, and the acceleration rate labeled as “Ctrl Inertial force.” For each page, there is a setting for the joint softness or proportional gain for each Dynamixel.