Info

On this page, you can find all the available information about the robot - including various technical details etc.

Construction

The robot has 22 degrees of freedom including two 6DOF hands (the IDs on the left show the motor ID in the low-level communication protocol):

1 - right shoulder forward-backward
2 - left shoulder forward-backward
3 - right shoulder lift
4 - left shoulder lift
5 - right elbow
6 - left elbow
19 - head rotate
20 - head lift
21 - right shoulder left-right
22 - left shoulder left-right

30 - controller in the right hand with palm sensor 

31 - right wrist rotate
33 - right wrist left-right

34 - right thumb lift
35 - right thumb close
36 - right index finger
37 - right other fingers

40 - controller in the left hand with palm sensor 

41 - left wrist rotate
43 - left wrist left-right

44 - left thumb lift
45 - left thumb close
46 - left index finger
47 - left other fingers

Software, links documentation

• NICO Software github repository: https://github.com/knowledgetechnologyuhh/NICO-software
  • the modifications for 6DOF hand are not available yet
  • our local generated API documentation: https://kempelen.dai.fmph.uniba.sk/nico-api-doc/_build/html/index.html
• SeedStudio manual https://kb.seedrobotics.com/doku.php?id=nico:start
• Dynamixel protocol documentation https://emanual.robotis.com/docs/en/dxl/protocol1/
• Dynamixel SDK https://emanual.robotis.com/docs/en/software/dynamixel/dynamixel_sdk/overview/
• working demos:
  • /NICO-software/api/examples/nicomotion/4-finger-nico/expressive_demo.py
  • /NICO-software/api/examples/nicomotion/4-finger-nico/relax.py
  • /NICO-software/api/examples/nicoface/*
  • /NICO-software/api/examples/nicoaudio/*
  • /direct-control/DynamixelSDK/c/example/protocol1.0/hands_demo/linux64/hands_demo

Low level control of motors and other

• connections PC to robot
  • USB3 - left camera
  • USB3 - right camera
  • USB - dynamixel protocol RS485 bus control of all motors and palm sensors typically at /dev/ttyUSB0
  • USB - control of LED matrix displays in the head, typically at /dev/ttyACM0 - these respond to text commands at 115200 bps
  • USB - audio in (microphones)
  • USB - audio out (speaker)
  • optional: USB for programming controllers in the hands
• hands_demo.c - simple demo made by modifying an example of DynamixelSDK

Vision

NICO’s head features two parallel See3CAMCU135 cameras with 4K resolution (4,096 × 2,160). The cameras have an opening angle of 202◦. Via the API, the camera can be configured to transmit only parts of the image and thus constrain the field of view to a human opening angle of 70◦.

To simply test the view of the cameras (they create the video devices /dev/video0 - left camera, /dev/video2 - right camera), you can use:

 fswebcam --device /dev/video0 imageL.jpg
 fswebcam --device /dev/video2 imageR.jpg

or to take pictures and record videos in interactive application:

 cheese

Audio

• Nico's ears contain microphones sampled with high-quality studio-recording equipment with 96 kHz, 24 bit sampling
• Nico's speaker (on the way, coming very soon)