Introduction


Robotis sent us one of the pre-launch boxes of the new Bioloid Premium kits. It is a pre-launch box meaning that the packaging, the parts, the software and electronics are all final. The only thing really missing is the final documentation. We received also two extra bits that are not going to be included in the retail box. The metal feet and the Zig100 zigbee module pair.


The Bioloid Premium Kit has many things in common with the Bioloid Comprehensive kit. Robotis have taken many aspects of the Comprehensive kit and upgraded them. The Bioloid Comprehensive Kit that has been with us for a few years and is still one of the best general purpose robotics kit with a large support community around the world. Robotis is planning to continue shipping the Comprehensive kit. The Premium kit will be more expensive than the Comprehensive and there will be an upgrade pack that will allow Comprehensive kit owners to upgrade to Premium.








The Premium box art includes text in the three main target languages - Korean, English and Japanese. It is better geared to catch the eye when displayed in a shop.


Feature comparison summary - Premium vs. Comprehensive kits

Feature Bioloid Comprehensive Kit Bioloid Premium Kit
Power


Battery Charging process Switching Power supply attached to CM5, battery attached to CM5. Software control of the charging process by CM5. Switching Power supply attached to dedicated LiPo Charger, attached to battery

Battery Type 88888 Mah, 11.4V250g ?? NiMh 7cell 989989 MaH, 11.1V 150g LiPo 3S10C

Battery Charger
Yuntong YT-0003S Input: 10-18V, Output 2S(8.4V) ; 3S(12.6V); 1.1A, Nominal Power: 15W

Continuous Power Supply


Battery location Inside the CM5 controler block Separate from the CM510 controler block and located lower on humanoid to lower the center-of-mass of the robot.




Structure


Documented Construction Configurations Humanoid, Hexapod, Car, Dog 3 Humanoids (different leg configurations), Hexapod, Car, Dog.

Head AX-S1 sensor module that includes 3 proximity infrared sensors, sound sensor and infrared receiver Custom transparent epoxy that can fit infrared receiver or zigbee remote












Sensors


RC100 Wireless Ir gamepad Not included Included

Servos 18 AX12 18 AX12

Construction time Humanoid: 8 hours Humanoid: 8 hours








Controler


Serial One on-board through-hole UART access designed for Zig100 module. One RS232 level for PC communcations with headphone interface. One external 4-pin port access to UART designed for Zig110 or Infrared module. One RS232 level for PC communcations with headphone interface.

Analog input none 6 analog ports









Price






Opening the Box


The first thing we noticed about the box is that its shape and content have been redesigned. The Premium box width and height are smaller but has more in depth. [ Shape and weight distribution play an important role when shipping individual boxes. The more the box measurements are closer to a cube and the weight inside it is distributed homogeneously, the more it is likely to survive the abuses of couriers. This matters mainly to online distributors who prefer the boxes to arrive in perfect shape to their customers.]

The content is well laid out and items are segregated intelligently to ensure excessive motion and hardship during shipping doesn't damage the content.

There are two layers in the box. The bottom one has 4 small boxes containing the different brackets. The top one has all the rest.



First thing we did is lay out all the parts on a table.




The Manual


The included quickstart guide is split into two parts. First part is written in English, Korean and Japanese. The second half of the document is completely pictorial and mostly without any writing. Origami style. There are 3 documented humanoids in the QuickStart guide. We chose to construct Humanoid type B with 16 servos.




The Battery


Yuntong LiPo solution
The charger is a 2S and 3S LiPo charger from Yuntong. The LiPo battery pack is in plastic enclosure. The NiMh battery of the Bioloid Comprehensive kit is charged by the CM5 controller board (with a special charging software that runs from the bootloader). The Premium CM510 controler board is not involved in charging which is performed by a dedicated LiPo charging device. The charger is from the same manufacturer of the batteries - Yutong.
The Bioloid Premium kit's LiPo battery is rated 1000mAh (mAh = milli-amps hour) and is probably of type 10C3S1P (to be confirmed). This means that if the battery were to be discharged at 1amp it would take 1 hour to completely discharge. We know it is a 3S battery because it is charged through the 3S charger's port with the 3S label (and the 3 cells are visible through the plastic coating). So it means it is internally composed of 3 batteries attached to each other in series; each one 3.7V (industry standard) and together 11.1V. It seems that this is a 10C battery which means that it is guaranteed to output 10amps continuously if necessary for 1/10 of an hour until it is discharged. LiPos can also output 2-3 times that much in small bursts, which for walking robots is great because of the high bursts of current needed to hold a servo position when a walking robot's leg hits the floor for example or during a Robo-One fight.
The AX12 servo consume about 100mAh up to 1000mAh. So an 18 servo humanoid robot will probably last about 30 minutes when not doing much. (during our initial use and test of the robot we kept it on for well over half an hour). When it continously walks or fights in a competition, it may probably consume on avarage 6amps meaning 10 minutes of continuous use.
The battery pack comes with an internal PCM (Protection Circuit Module) under its protective red plastic wrap, which is a small PCB that, in order to prevent charge/discharge disasters associated with LiPo, prevents over-charging, over-discharging and ensuring discharging current doesn't exceed maximum allowed.



The battery casing has been designed to allow easy replacement of battery by sliding the case open side ways. This is very useful for long hours of robotic tweeking or during competitions. The old CM5 setup had the battery inside a single block with the controler PCB board and required a few screws for battery extraction. The new setup has seen separation between the controler block and the battery block. This also acheived the lowering of the center-of-mass of the humanoid robot which helps in passive stability.





The CM510 Controler Block

The CM510 is the name of the new controler block. The PCB board is similar to the Bioloid Comprehensive CM5 in shape and exposed input buttons. The CM510 board is based on Atmega2561 rather than Atmega128, meaning twice the memory for programs, motions and bootloader. The CM510 plastic container block is smaller than the CM5 block (which contains space for the battery).
The 6 sides of the block expose various interfaces including 6 analog ports. The old CM5 didn't expose any I/O ports of the Atmega128.

Left to right: Power Supply (you can also run the robot off the mains power); LiPo; AX12 bus; 4-pin TTL serial interface Infrared or zig110; RS232 headphone jack interface

On the left is an I/O port two horizontal lines each one 5 pins GND, 5V, Analog sensor input. The right port is for the AX12 bus.

The fuse (which protects the servos from burning by limiting the maximum current going out to the servos) is tiny and external. Changing the fuse on the old CM5 required taking the block apart and exposing the PCB. Making the fuse externaly accessbile and much smaller is a clever design improvement.

The top of the CM510 box is similar ot the CM5 with 6 button inputs and 7 LED indicators and an on/off switch. Note that the text on the sides mark the side port interfaces.


The USB2Dynamixel (direct PC control)


The USB2Dynamixel is a mandatory device to all Bioloid owners or those who would like to learn how to to work with Robotis servos. The device plugs into the PC's USB port and to the Dynamixel bus. Robotis has a couple of standards for Dynamixel enabled servos. The AX series servos work at half-duplex UART and the RX and DX servos work at full duplex. [Dynamixel protocol is single-master so full-duplex may allow some speed improvement through parallelization of back/forth packets and provides less chance of interferences with longer cable and more elements on the bus.]
The PC sees the Robotis servos through an emulated serial port (FTDI chip on the USB2Dynamixel module) and there are several tools and SDKs to communicate with the servos directly from the PC.



The RC110 Gamepad and Zig110 interface


The RC110 is a gamepad designed for remote-controling the robot. It allows for any keys and key combination to be sent over to the robot's controller in order for it to execute whatever motions. The great innovation about the new RC110 is that it can either work with Infrared or it can work with Zigbee. (Pictures included later regarding how to









The AS-S20 motion sensor

The AS-S20 is a Bioloid compliant IMU (Intertial Moment Unit) module that incorporates 3 accelertion and 3 magnetic sensors in one chip. It is an unconventional solution to robotic IMU (we are used to gyros) but the result is impressive and surely will become a standard given its overall excellent value. The board is Bioloid Dynamixel compliant meaning that it has one MCU chip of type ATMega8 that implements the Dynamixel protocol over its UART link and talks to the sensor chip over SPI. The sensor chip AMS0805WAH from Amosense (Korean company) is composed of 3-Axis Magnetic sensor, 3-Axis Acceleration sensor, and a custom ASIC that provides sophisticated data calibration and facilitates a high-level communications protocol over SPI. It allows highly accurate motion detection with geomagnetic direction and tilting data. The biggest advantage of AMS0805WAH is the exclusive embedded calibration algorithm called iRAC(Intelligent Real Time Automatic Calibration) which eliminates the need for initial calibrations and supports precise calculation of motion data under all environments. It is widely used and applied in handheld devices such as cellular phones (orientation), navigation applications (“dead reckoning” where gps is not enough or doesn't work), 3-D pointing device, game controllers and even Calorie counters.
Some of the chip's features:
- Wide Magnetic Measurable Range: +/- 10Gauss
- Minimum Measurable Magnetic field: 10nT (0.1mGuass)
- Maximum sampling rate: 30Hz
- Azimuth & Roll/Pitch Resolution: 1 degree
- Wide Interface Voltage: 1.6Volt ∼5.0Volt
- Low power: 6.5mA in active mode
The new software that comes with the Premium Kit allows to monitor the signal coming from the sensor and it seems to be pretty stable, reactive and with almost no noise. Because it measures the magnetic field in 3 axis, it is able to precisely provide 3D rotation speed tensor as do the more expensive solid state 3-axis gyros, but in addition it can also provide the absolute angle relative to Earth's magnetic North without accumulating error. The resolution of the chip is 1 degree, which is fine for robotic applications. The sampling rate is 30Hz which is fast enough for navigation and probably also for stabilization [[ to be confirmed with Robotis ]].



The Infrared Sensors

The Premium kit comes with 4 infrared sensors. One of them (here on the right) is the RC110 receiver. The other three are distance sensors. The Sharp distance sensor is very popular in the hobby electronics world providing accurate measurement to within milimeters upto a range, in this case, of 80cm. It is intended to be fitted onto the Humanoid's chest. The other two Ir sensors are intended to be fit onto the Humanoid's feet or sholders. The Bioloid Comprehensive kit came with a single module AX-S1 that incorporated three distance sensors in 3 directions. The Premium kit setup allows for more liberty as to where to fit the distance sensors.
One interesting addition is the inclusion of OLLO connectors to attach the Ir modules onto the Robotis servos and brackets. OLLO is a "lego" like set for children to build motorized and animated critters with various patented connectors and it now shares some parts with Bioloid. Robotis have integrated the OLLO technology into the Bioloid. This integrative approach is also shown in the new software that is compatible with both the Bioloid and OLLO product lines.








Assembling the Humanoid type B

The new Premium Humanoid was designed for maximum customization and personalization. The head and chest are provided in transparent epoxy that can easily be painted to one's own taste in fashion.

We chose type B humanoid with 16 servos (Degrees of Freedom - DOF) for this first assembly. Type A has 18 servos and type C also has 16 servos with slightly different leg configuration.

We begin with the torso of the Humanoid. Some of the build sequences in the book are shared among the 3 types of humanoids and the book references the relevant page in type-A humanoid where the details are described.


To build the arms, some servos need to be attached with side brackets that in turn will allow side linkage.



bump pin in the shaft helps assembling and alligning the servo shaft and horn correctly.



The arm assembly is taken from Humanoid A. The leg assembly allows for optional aluminum feet that increase foot surface and friction to improve stability. These aluminum feet are not part of the premium kit but were given to us for evaluation. We chose in this initial build to use the standard plastic soles.


Small mistake in the leg assembly was identified after an hour's work. Cables need to fit under the bracket. Need to disassemble and realign properly.


After about six attempts, it seems we got it right and the legs can happily be attached to the torso.