Overview
Trike is a robot built from an iRobot Create, a Kinect, a netbook, and a camera tripod.
Building Trike
Rewire Kinect
We rewired our Kinect, similarly to as in kinect/Tutorials/Adding a Kinect to an iRobot Create. However, we pulled power from the cargo bay headers, and also put the 12V regulator on the Create-side of the power connectors, so that we could still use the original wall wart when testing for long periods of time
On the 25-pin connector, pin 25 is ground and pins 10, 11, and 12 are switched power (approximately 15 volts). Using a male 25-pin d-sub connector, we wired up a power/ground connection:
We then installed the 12V regulator, as found in kinect/Tutorials/Adding a Kinect to an iRobot Create on a small protoboard, and attached a power connector to the output:
We also put a matching connector on the original power supply, so that we can switch between wall power and robot battery.
Prep Tripod
To mount the Kinect to a tripod, we printed an adapter on a Makerbot 3D printer. This design can be found on Thingiverse:
Assemble
We then fabricated a small stand to mount the tripod on. This was cut from 3/4" MDF and screwed down to the Create using the cargo bay mounts. We installed three wood screws to which the legs of the tripod were tie-strapped:
By having the top edge of the wood screws capture the foot of the tripod, this is a very rigid mount:
Lastly, we gave the robot some character, with some awesome orange hair:
Software
Trike has his own software package, with launch files just for him. Currently, this includes:
trike_tf.launch - configures tf frames for the Kinect and mobile base.
trike_perception.launch - starts the Kinect with VGA color image and QQVGA point cloud. Includes trike_tf.launch internally.
trike_bringup.launch - starts everything, includes trike_perception.launch and also connects to the iRobot Create mobile base on /dev/ttyUSB0. Will eventually include a URDF model for visualizations.