Advice about a robot

Help & Support Robots & Kits
1

Hello,

I would like to build a volley-ball player.
My plan is to use ROS (simulator + robot).
I found two interesting humanoids; Darwin and Mindstorm.
It seems that Darwin is powerful but cannot move fastly (engadget.com/2011/07/12/darwin-op-charli-2-humanoids-make-history-at-robocup-2011-u-s) and Mindstorm seems very reactive but I’m not sure it would be able to handle vision algorithms(youtube.com/watch?v=L_jD1fHr1Kw).

Any suggestion to build this kind of robot ?

Thanks in advance,
Fabien

2

There are not many volleyball robots (even prototypes) out there. Most motors cannot react fast enough to cause a ball to bounce, nor do they have any internal mechanism to dampen the impact (the the motors are stressed during every blow). Suggest a custom humanoid (or modified commercial humanoid) where you replace the shoulder servos with much faster ones. LEGO Mindstorms would not be powerful enough nor fat enough (nor have enough degrees of freedom) to make a walking robot with arms…

3

I’ll have a look at the bioloid.
Perhaps, I can hack it.

Fabien