BowlerStudio: A robotics development platform

Neuron Robotics Cooperative is a worker owned enterprise that designs and deploys robot controllers to make the process or building robots easy. While i understand that is a bold statement, we have built software based on top-tier research grade and medically certified robotics control platform, and added an easy to use and learn application interface, BowlerStudio.

To that end, the DyIO and BowlerStudio should be concidered as one project, seperated out here on Hackaday.io for the purpose of making each easier for members of the site to understand.

That said, we have already begun using this robotics design platform as a way to teach kids programming, and keep their attention from day one with robots! We use a Java based platform to teach programmatic CAD, and then attach that CAD to kinematics models and let the kids see each step of the way what they are creating. The Dyio takes that excitement out of the computer and brings to life the printed parts that the students generated. We see this platform solving the large air-gap in the learning process between introduction to the concept of programming and building robots, and the final satisfaction of having actually created a robot. By closing this gap it is easier to keep up the excitement for learning, and increasing student engagement.

Basically it makes learning fun again because robots are inherently engaging.

This week we took BowlerStudio on the road. We taught a class of 15 students ages 9-14 years old, kids programming. We went through variables and functions by making calls to JCSG. The students made each step in their own Github Gist, so that have a step by step record of everything they did. We used the history to show them how to find changes and differences,and to look at what they had done. To check their code, they would run it in BowlerStudio and see the 3d shapes start to appear on the screen. They each made a little R2D2 model and then attached that model to the walking robot and was able to drive it around! I have no pictures because of rules involving kids and pictures, but they all made it through and got hier robot modeled and driving from source code in 1 week of 3 hour sessions.

In htis video you can see the process of going from a designed robot to a 3d printable parts file. It shows you how to generate parts, and the file structure of where the parts are placed.

This robot was generated by BowlerStudio based on a simple slide-bar style interface. The robot parts were generated an then sent to my 3d printer and printed out. I assembled the robot and used BowlerStudio to calibrate it in about an hour (full assembly and calibration in that time). Then i just give the command to walk with the game controller and away it goes. You can see the live 3d visualization of the robot on the screen behind it. Notice the way all the legs are all swept back or forward, that is a trick i figured out to use cheap servos and distribute the load across them. most hexapods do not do this because the control math would be much too difficult. In BowlerStudio, it starts with the math solved, then generates the robot that implements it.