Petoi robot joint index
We humans and many other legged animals have many joints. They give us the freedom to move in many ways. Though it's difficult to reproduce those complex motions on a robot, we can simplify all those joints to limited numbers of actuators.
When controlling so many joints, the first thing is to index them. We can define an order according to their distance from the torso. For example, the shoulder joint is closer to the torso than the elbow joint, and the joint that let us look around is closer to the torso than the joint that let us nod. If we had tails, it would be as close as the head compared to the shoulder joints.
So we can order the joints in this way: head panning, head tilting, tail panning, tail tilting, 4x shoulder (or hip) roll, 4x shoulder (or hip) pitch, 4x elbows (or knees). For the joints in the same distance group, we can index them clockwise from the front-left corner if the body is looked at from behind.
And when we map those joints to a specific robot, the indexing becomes more practical. The ordering for the joint servo pins on NyBoard is like below:
The index number of the joint servo has no corresponding relationship with the PWM pin number on the main board. You don't even need to read the pin numbers on the PCB board.
Last modified 28d ago