PHOENIXFrame programming robot

Overview

1. I am engaged in software development and have never been exposed to hardware before. Due to personal interest, I accidentally discovered that robot development and game development have many similarities. However, I feel that robot development is too complicated for novices, especially when using the Ros engine, the development experience is difficult to describe, and it can only run on Linux. Needless to say, this is far from the cross-platform and elegant development concept of the software industry that I have been engaged in for a long time. Furthermore, many people just want to own an intelligent robot that they can control freely. Can development be made simpler so that developers stay up less late and lose less hair? ——This is the original intention of doing this project.
2. With this idea, I decided to "reinvent the wheel" from scratch, hoping to make a robot software environment that is simpler and easier to develop; only using Arduino, Raspberry, a classic microcontroller computer motherboard that is ubiquitous and easy to buy in the market. I suddenly realized that this project requires learning a lot of knowledge from scratch. But if it is done, it will be a very meaningful thing, because it will allow people to learn to develop robot algorithms and return to the essence of the principles. It is not just about learning to configure various configuration files and watching some ambiguous translation tutorials! But I didn't think about replacing the Ros robot engine, after all, it already has huge community contributions. But it can make people "learn three chords and form a band." It became my belief in doing this project.
3. In the process of making robots, I came into contact with the Jialichuang platform and its EDA, as well as Jialichuang's single-process software and services. It feels very powerful and easy to use! ! ! Making PCB should be that simple, I just want to be a robot. My thoughts immediately changed, and I gave up the expensive and time-consuming idea of ​​using metal sheets to make the fuselage, and instead used epoxy resin PCB circuit boards as the fuselage structural parts. In this process, I conceived "a rubber band buckle structure" (I have applied for a patent for this design;-D), which is conducive to the installation of the robot; and can effectively solve the problem that users have to install new functional modules. The robot is disassembled and reinstalled, repeating the time-consuming process, saving time and energy. “Keep this project going” became something I kept insisting on.

Features

The full name of this project is PHOENIX Develop Kit (PDK) , which includes a hardware and a software; PHOENIXFrame is the hardware trademark of this project and is a robot hardware entity based on the open source cross-platform Slam robot engine PHOENIXEngine . The PDK software is open source, but the hardware is not free. The motherboard structure may be disclosed, but for its better development, I positioned it as a semi-commercial project. It has the following features:

1. Use Jialichuang PCB as the main structure of the fuselage
2. Using only Raspberry or Jetson Nano, Arduino board as robot brain and cerebellum
3. Supports 3.5-inch screen and 5-inch screen versions
4. It has 8 18650 battery packs, supports multi-voltage output, power display, and also supports a simple function of returning power to the host program.
5. Supports autonomous robot Slam mapping, positioning and navigation, AStar global path planning, and DWA local path planning within an area of ​​300 square meters.
6. Support Snowboy and iFlytek intelligent voice wake-up
7. Support Yuanyang intelligent voice dialogue, docking with Baidu, iFlytek and other platforms
8. Support automatic charging technology
9. Support Sara intelligent voice processing system
10. Support RTSP/RTMP remote video streaming
11. Supports adaptive UI interface development components, 3D simulation development environment, native game server program including IOCP/EPOLL, the core of which is derived from the game engine PHOENIX3D I developed early on
12. Snappy, a graphical programming environment that supports my own modifications
13. The core code of the project body uses C++ and Lua scripts, and the Web-related components use NodeJS and LayUI. Support undifferentiated code running in: Window, Linux (including ARM platform), Android, IOS environment
14. Because the logic code is based on scripts, it supports one-click rapid over-the-air deployment (hot update)

Summarize

Many features of the project have basically been implemented and can be run on robots. However, because it involves many technical fields and the amount of code is huge, estimated to exceed 300,000 lines, I am still in the final repair stage. Because I am not an electronics major, I currently only use PCB drawing and no schematic diagrams. This project has been under continuous development for 4 years. During this period, I also needed to work on other projects to support the company and myself. The ultimate goal of this project is: users can have

• Private - you can easily modify the code through programming, improve and upgrade modules, and have complete control over your own robot hardware.
• Open - Robot software that is easy to collaborate with other people to develop, jointly improve content, share development results, and share and exchange development experiences.