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Project M: MANOI AT01 Progress Report #6 (Video)

It's Alive! It's Alive!

Well, maybe not truly 'alive', but our MANOI AT01 robot is almost completely assembled and working. Considering all the extra time we spent writing down notes, taking photos and videos, the assembly process has gone surprisingly quickly - roughly six hours in total if we had just sat down and focused exclusively on it.

Today, Saturday here in Japan, we finished the final steps of the leg assembly, built the main body, attached the legs and arms, did all the cable routing, plugged all the servos into the controller, and did some initial visual inspections/QC before we buttoned it up for testing.

We still have a few more assembly steps left to complete. The last body frames need to be screwed in place along with the robots head. There's more cable guides to attach, and a cover for the electronics that needs to be cut, trimmed, and installed. If all goes well, sometime tomorrow we'll have this behind us and can focus on the software and motion creation.

At first we felt a little frustrated by the shear volume of pages and diagrams in the manual. The assembly manual has 104 pages by itself. But, as we worked through the process we were really glad that the robot manual was so detailed. It was really easy to use and understand. One technique that we found to be extremely helpful was to open the manual pdf file and zoom in on each assembly drawing. Blowing up each of the exploded drawings to life size or even bigger really made it easy to compare to the parts in our hands.

The leg assemblies mated with the body. We had to retrace our steps once because we discovered a wire that was inadvertently pinched underneath a bracket.

The two arm assemblies that were built a couple of days ago mated with the shoulder units and robot body.

You can see the controller placement in the robots body at the top of this image. Kyosho provides excellent cable routing guides that screw onto the frame.

Totally awesome! You can imagine how we felt when we got this far in the assembly process.

It may look a little like a rat's nest, but it is much cleaner and more orderly than other robot kits we've seen. Plugging the servos into the controller board only took a couple of minutes. Then it was time to verify our wiring by operating each of the servos in turn using the application software:

More soon!

Related links:

Project M: MANOI Posts (English)

Kyosho MANOI AT01 Official Website (Japanese)

Posted by Lem on September 9, 2006 | Permalink | Email this post

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