ER1 Version 1.0.2.78 Release Notes 10/11/02 -------------------------------------------------------- Thank you for purchasing Evolution Robotics' ER1 robot and the Robot Control Center software! Please read these release notes before assembling your robot and installing your software. We're proud of the reliability of our product, but nothing is perfect. These release notes document workarounds for any known issues related to our software and hardware. Log into our website at www.evolution.com and register your robot at your earliest convenience. You'll find hints, FAQs, software updates, giveaways, user bulletin boards, and a free robotmail account for you to use to send email to your robot. You can chat with other users, get answers to your questions, report bugs, download bug fixes and new behaviors, purchase accessories for your robot, and more. Our site is designed to enhance your robot-owning experience, so please check it out. When you're ready to start working with your robot, refer to the User Guide. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the world of the ER1. Chapter 2 is the Getting Started chapter, which walks you through assembling your robot, attaching your laptop and installing your software. In this chapter, you'll be referred to various sections of the manual as appropriate for the model of robot you purchased. Once your robot is up-and-running, load the behavior ER1box.rbt into your RCC software as follows: 1. Click on the ER1 icon to start the application on your laptop. 2. Click on the "Open" button and the open file dialog should come up, showing the content of the ER1 directory. 3. Double click on the behaviors sub-directory to open it, displaying a list of .rbt files. 4. Select the ER1box.rbt file and click on the "Open" button to load it. 5. The ER1box.rbt program will load. 6. Click on the green "RUN IT" button at the top right of the RCC program. 7. Pick up the box that the robot was packed in, and show it to the robot (the side of the box with the multicolored robots should be facing the robot's camera). 8. The robot should tell you that it sees the box, and that it will move towards the box if you move the box farther away from it. 9. When you're done with the robot behavior, click STOP. You can find other behaviors on the CD. Load them and try them out. Also check our web site frequently. We'll be posting new behaviors regularly for you to download. -------------------------------------------------------- WARNINGS Now for a few common-sense warnings: The robot is a heavy moving object that could possibly knock over furniture or tumble down a flight of stairs. So take care when running your robot to ensure that there are no sharp drop-offs (such as a staircase) or breakable objects near the robot. The robot runs on a rechargeable battery that is smaller than, but similar to a motorcycle or car battery. Our batteries are solidly constructed, but any battery of this type contains corrosive liquids that can spill or outgas if they are stored upside down, dropped, charged with the wrong type of charger or otherwise treated in a manner contrary to the explicit warnings in the User Guide. The robot's wheels are driven by exposed belts. Ensure that the tails of sleeping cats, errant toy cars left behind by your two-year-old, and other items are not in contact with the wheels or the belts before turning on and/or causing your robot to move. Possible problems from incorrect operation of the hardware include, but are not limited to: Electric shock or chemical burns from mishandling of the battery Damage to your laptop and/or the robot if the robot is directed to drive down a set of stairs, or in front of a heavy moving object. Possible harm to children, pets, and expensive household objects due to reckless movement commands given to the robot. Fire or other problems caused by an unattended, moving robot knocking over candles, objects near a fireplace, etc. -------------------------------------------------------- OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION The following items are important for you to be aware of: The ER1 Robot Control software is a 1024 by 768 application. It will run on all displays with 1024 by 768 or higher resolution. Because the application has a large number of fixed fields, it will not scale/resize, so on screens larger than 1024 by 768 it will have a border around it, but will continue to work perfectly. It will not run on 800 by 600 or 640 by 480 displays unless you have scrolling software that allows you to view a larger window on your monitor. When assembling your robot, avoid potential damage to the camera by not pressing down on the top of the camera to seat the hinge. NEVER unplug the stepper motor cables from the Robot Control Module while the robot is powered on. Doing so could damage the RCM. In order to ensure that this does not happen accidentally, during the robot assembly, CAREFULLY TIGHTEN THE SCREWS that hold the cables onto the connectors. The RCC software sometimes has interaction problems with the power-saving and hibernation features on certain laptops. Turn off these features before starting the RCC software. The accuracy of Object Recognition will be greatly enhanced if you train the robot to recognize the object against a bland background before asking the robot to find the object in a noisy background. If you would like to use a hub with your laptop, we've had good results with 4-port, self-powered hubs from Adesso and Hyperion Products. Most other hubs should also work fine, but we've seen a few problems with the interaction of the ER1 and the SOHO-USB4W + 4 Port USB Hub. Do not attempt to lift your assembled robot by the top Xbeam/camera assembly. If you do so, the connectors may become detached. Always lift and carry your robot from the bottom. (If a connector does come loose, you should use the allen wrench to retighten the set screws until they come in contact with the Xbeams.) ALL set screws on the robot should be tightened until they touch the Xbeam. If you have your robot configured for remote control, there's an extremely small chance that some other user could gain control your robot. (This would only happen if that user employed the same Ethernet settings you did and was within transmission range of your robot.) Always remember to program a password in your robot's remote control settings to safeguard your robot. If you wiggle the jack that plugs into the Power Module, the LED on the battery charger may blink or change from green to red. This is normal. In a few seconds, the charger will determine whether it should be displaying red (charging) or green (charged), and the LED will be changed if necessary to accurately reflect the state of the Power Module. It is a fundamental characteristic of stepper motors that, if some kind of obstacle temporarily alters the rotation of one wheel, but not the other, that the steppers will come out of sync. When this happens, the robot may move erratically, or stop moving and make a grinding noise. To fix this, just stop and restart the robot (after removing the obstacle, of course). The caster wheel may catch on some carpeting., Turn off the robot, lift it slightly, and free it from the carpet. Then turn the robot back on. -------------------------------------------------------- NEW FEATURES Software version 1.0.2.78 supercedes software version 1.0.1.70. You can download a new copy of the User Guide *.pdf from our website. This describes the new features in detail. Briefly, software version 1.0.2.78 contains the following new features: Motion detection has been added to the IF/Sight area of the GUI as a third sight trigger option. Each IF/Sight option now has a radio button associated with it. You can adjust the motion detection settings through the Behavior Settings/Sight tab. A new area has been added to the IF/Sight/Capture pop-up menu. It allows you to associate a sound file with an object so that the sound file will play immediately whenever the ER1 sees that object. A new button has been added to the IF/Sight/Modify pop-up menu. When you click this button, a window will appear, with a display of the active image overlaid with purple circles identifying areas the software is keying on to recognize the object. Additional statistical recognition information has been added to the Object Recognition text display. Remote video compression and resolution settings have been added to the Settings/Camera tab. An API has been made available with this version. You can use the API to write programs that will command the robot without using the GUI. To use this feature, on the robot's laptop, go to the Settings/Remote Control tab, and click on the new "Allow API control of this instance" radio button. The commands, samples, and instructions can be found in the latest version of the User Guide. -------------------------------------------------------- WORKAROUNDS Here's a list of known issues and workarounds for them: Behaviors continue to run after speech recognition pop-up is closed, If you want to see the speech recognition pop-up window again, you must stop your behavior and restart it. Recognition software occasionally has trouble recognizing glossy items, Shiny, polished items sometimes confuse the object recognition software. Try adjusting the lighting around the object. The Time condition drop-down menu may make it appear that only hourly time is allowed, As the user documentation explains, if you want to program a condition to occur other than on the hour, just type in the time you'd like to use, and that will overwrite the pull-down value. The tab order for various fields throughout the GUI may not be in the most logically correct order. Robot seems to be repelled by a color it should be following. This isn't really a bug. If your robot moves in a direction opposite to what you're expecting, you may have the motor assemblies plugged into the control module backwards, or you may have specified a stopping distance that is less than the robot's current distance from the color (in this case, the robot will properly back up so that it is no closer than the specified distance to the robot). The robot does not record audio and also does not transmit audio to/from remote computer. This feature request will be addressed in a later version of the software, check our website for software updates. The camera may become difficult to use in very bright sunlight. This is a fact of life when working with non-studio grade cameras. Avoid pointing your robot's camera towards bright sunlight. Some laptops, including the Toshiba Tecra 8100. PIII might not fit correctly on the robot. Let us know right away if you encounter this problem with your laptop and we'll try to work something out for you. Occasionally, the robot stops responding during Teleoperation. Ensure that you're not exceeding the transmitting distance of your wireless network. In the RCC software, go to Settings/Remote Control and click on "Reset connection now." Obstacle avoidance "distracts" the robot from it's programmed path. If you see this problem, you may not have your properly aligned and calibrated your obstacle avoidance camera. See the user documentation for more on this. Losing a remote connection while programming a behavior may seem to result in loss of trained images. If this occurs, reload your behavior *.rbt file. If you still don't see the images, close and reopen the application. To zero out the x and y coordinates, turn the robot off/on, or close/reopen the application. You may see a failure to record video error when using some codecs. This will be addressed in a later release of the software. The following codecs should work reliably: None DV Video Encoder Intel IYUV and Indeo (various versions)* Microsoft RLE Microsoft video 1 Cinepak If recording does not work with one of the above codecs, retry your video recording and it should work.