Hi!
I have recently bought a used Aldebaran Pepper robot, that mostly works, but has one issue. When the motors are off (and it is supposed to be in the rest position) it leans heavily to one side. Then the motors are on it seems ok, although it does struggle a bit keeping upright. Now I had a look, and there are two rubber “bands” that pull the upper body down. But one of them is much tighter (too tight) than the other one. And that is what is pulling the robot to one side.
Now, I have contacted Aldebaran support, but as expected they want me to ship the robot to them for repair. Which due to the size and weight (it’s like 1.5m long shipping box, that weighs around 40kg) wouldn’t be exactly cheap. They say that the issue is with a plastic part that wears down, but didn’t give me more information than that.
Has anyone here had experience with repairing one of these before and has an idea on what could be wrong?
I could try 3D printing them or otherwise fixing them… if I knew where the problematic parts even are . Support doesn’t want to tell me. But by the looks of it, there is nothing in the upper section, so it must be somewhere in the lower section.
My guess is that it is in the section marked with the arrow. Problem is that I have no idea how to get to it. I fear like I would need to take the whole upper section off, but I am not sure.
As for the rubber bands… those look to be completely fine.
My question would be: Maybe it needs to lean heavily on both sides? Maybe left side is good, but the right side cannot lean to the end because the motor or whatever is not pulling this band enough?
I don’t think so. When you move the robot to one side (the one that isn’t pulling that hard) the band basically disengages (which is what you see in the picture in the first post). The one on the side that seems to be pulling too hard never does that.
Actually I think this is might actually be one band attached at the bottom. It’s just that the motor is pulling the band left/right to tilt the robot. And it seems like it’s in the “wrong position” currently because it skipped for unknown reason before I got the robot.
Yeah, it does look like the same issue. Sadly they are only showing the disassembly of the bottom part. But whatever is the problem must be located higher at the top of the leg section.
Yeah, that Nikkei article is actually a bit more useful. Sadly I needed to get through web archive to get the actual content. If anyone is searching for this (thumbnails don’t work, but clicking images seems to be ok): 'Pepper' Humanoid Robot Teardown (3) - Nikkei Technology Online
There is one clean picture that shows the upper body removed:
Sadly they never disassemble the part with the rubber bands. And the images still give me no indication of how to get in there.
Well, update from my side… I sent the Pepper to Aldebaran to get it fixed and I finally got it back last week. They replaced those rubber bands and a few more of the rubber parts. Though the repair price (including shipping back) was quite shocking. I paid about 1800€ for the repair.
Correct, yes. The parts were like 50€ in total. The rest is all labor and shipping.
The worst thing here is that they do offer hardware support for these, but no longer support the software side. So any cloud functionality that they had - including the appstore where you could get apps for them is gone. Not even stuff like “basic channel” which gives you some very basic functionality.
Currently waiting for some time where I can “play” with it.
But basically there are no apps installed. I just have the Choreographe software and SDKs to make my own - which was mostly my plan anyways. But it would be great to have some of the original apps that would at least give it some basic autonomy.
. Support doesn’t want to tell me. But by the looks of it, there is nothing in the upper section, so it must be somewhere in the lower section.
