Zeno Robotics and AI Institute

I'm interested in adding a DIY synthetic radar to my drone (kit). I won't say why at this point, so please don't ask. I have come across an interesting DIY SAR that was made using an SoC FPGA due to the need for processing a large amount of data with a strict timing requirements. Here is a link to the details of the system: https://lnkd.in/gxjmjGrb

ZenoRobotics is going full force into a new venture, so I have made a slight update to my website for now. I am going to do my best to self fund this until I can perhaps obtain a government contract (from a government I believe in). That is the hope for now. So, there is a strong need to get out to various military drone events and make contacts. A demo of a first proof of concept (PoC) system needs to be produced ASAP. I currently have put together a long list of system capabilities and diverse sensor types together and am working on creating a top level diagram of the system. Then I will work on pushing down into the details from there. This system will have quite an advance AI, navigation, and compute system, as well as a barrage of different sensors for data fusion. zenorobotics.com

The Pico is now working with my BNO055 Adafruit knockoff board. I have it working with microPython and C/C++ (Arduino IDE). The UART works on both as well. Since my motor controller code is in C++ I will port over my existing code to run on the Pico, thus replacing the Arduino Mega on my bots!

I have added a new blog about my experience with my new (knockoff) BNO055 sensor. It is a quick read so please check it out if you are interested in seeing what my findings were. https://lnkd.in/gUe3Rn_g

Hi All! From my quick research on the topic, it looks like TPU filament is the best form making drone frames. Does anyone want to weigh in on this? I'm looking to start making some test drones. Thank you!

I’m taking some time tonight to replace the 6-axis MPU6050 IMU with a 9-axis BNO055 IMU. I just did this for my tankbot, so I’m porting the code over to my Ratbot-Telepresence robot. Next, I want to replace the Arduino Mega (off loads motor control, data acquisition, and redundant odometry calculations) with the Raspberry Pi Pico. The base frame (made of wood), motor + brackets, and motor controller have been assembled since circa 2015. It has a Jetson Orin Nano for its brain ?? , YDLidar G1, and currently an Oak-D camera. In its beginning, the robot was my emulated rat for autonomous navigation research. At that time it sported an Arduino for its brain, ultrasonic sensors for object avoidance, the MPU6050 IMU, and a Pixy camera for color combination recognition. I’m thinking about creating my own autonomous navigation systems, as I did with the ratbot way back in, but with a more sophisticated algorithm given the depth sensor. You always learn a lot working from the ground up! And, you never know what impact you might possibly make. #bno055 #md25 #oak-d #slam #jetsonorin #ratbot #securitybot

I received my RPi Camera conversion cables. Now I can use my RPi cameras with the Jetson Orin Nano and the Raspberry Pi 5! I’m looking forward to giving the system a test soon. I will post an update with a video.

The link below was very helpful to me last night as I was looking at streaming ROS odometry data and wanted to derive the Euler rotation angle of my robot. Since pose.rotation.x & .y values were essentially zero, I just a punched in the z and w Quaternion values to get the angle theta I was looking for. The odometry data I was using came from my telepresence robot that was running ROS on a Jetson Orin Nano and using the Oak-D camera for IMU data, depth and optical flow from the monochrome binocular cameras. The odometry data was being derived by RTABMap. The target of this endeavor was to convert gyro-Z axis data from the BNO055 9-axis IMU to the ROS/ROS2 Rep 102 Standard Units of Measure and Coordinate Conventions. https://lnkd.in/gEiWwzxP