User manual

II. WiRobot Overview

WiRobot

is an integrated electronic and software robotic system extended from Dr Robot’s

comprehensive humanoid robot, which has demonstrated its interactive capabilities in the public and

the media. Each WiRobot development system is designed to provide a user-friendly programming

environment for hobbyists, students in robotic areas and researchers to develop their robot programs

and applications at an affordable cost.

The power of WiRobot mobile robot system comes from the Dr Robot’s Distributed Computation

Robotic Architecture and System (DIRAS) technology, which offloads most of the computation and

storage intensive tasks to a home PC. Through a digital wireless connection supporting over 100kbps

data communication rate, user programs running on PC are virtually connected directly to the

WiRobot development system. Data such as image, audio, sensor information, and etc. are available to

the user through a set of ActiveX control components (SDK) developed for MS VC++ and VB

programming environment. Multiple PC programs are also allowed to access the data information

obtained from the sensors simultaneously. High level schemes such as tele-operation, navigation,

reasoning, learning, recognition, and image processing routines are programmed and executed on the

PC remotely. Multi-robot coordination is also feasible for applications like soccer game. Microsoft

Visual Studio programming environment is chosen as the development platform due to its popularity

and ease-of-use than the non-user friendly embedded programming interface. Note that

communication protocol for WiRobot system is also available for developers/researchers who prefer

to use different platform or operating systems to communicate and control the WiRobot system. But

this document focuses on how to use the WiRobot system using the SDK under Microsoft platform.

As well, WiRobot system already comes with low-level drivers for all its electronic modules and can

provide a flexible way for users to control the robot. For instance, it allows user to control standard

servo motors and DC motors by using the built-in commands available in the control command library,

which offers several types of DC motor control method including open-loop PWM, closed-loop

position control, closed-loop velocity control, and closed-loop current control. Control parameters are

also configurable.