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Welcome to the COM3528 Lab Course wiki!

This Wiki is designed primarily for students taking COM3528 Cognitive and Biomimetic Robotics and is integral part of the COM3528 practicals. The aim is to give you the tools and technical skills required to successfully perform your biomimetic or bioinspired group project using the MiRo robots.

The course will help you get familiar with the Miro Developer Kit (or MDK for short), and get a better idea of the capabilities and limitations of the MiRo platform itself, thus helping you design a study which can feasibly be completed in the relatively short timeframe.

Preliminaries

This course assumes prior knowledge of the Robot Operating System (ROS), and some experience of working in Linux and using terminal. Computer Science Students that have had COM2009/3009 Robotics labs should feel right at home; for anyone else without a ROS background, I strongly recommend to have a look at this excellent COM2009 wiki prepared by Dr Tom Howard. Computer Science Students might also remember working with MiRo and MiRoCode as part of the COM1005 Machines and Intelligence labs; that previous experience, while certainly useful, is not essential for this course.

Structure

The labs will start with an overview of the MDK in the Gazebo simulator, also serving as a ROS refresher and giving you a chance to apply some of the concepts you have learnt in COM2009 on a different robot. The first part is designed to be done on the Diamond workstations inside the WSL-ROS environment, and so the workflow should be familiar.

Afterwards, the dedicated Diamond laptops will be used to connect to and control physical MiRos. There are some important differences between the real and the simulated robot, as some things that you can do in the simulator are not possible in the real world and vice versa.

(Re-)Introducing MiRo

MiRo is a biomimetic robot platform developed by Consequential Robotics Ltd, a spin-out company of the University of Sheffield. MiRo is a wheeled robot platform equipped with multiple sensor systems and with eight degrees of freedom (DOF) of movement. MiRo is designed to show a number of generic features of mammalian sensorimotor systems, including a 2-DOF neck, and a binocular vision system with non-parallel geometry resembling a small mammal such as a cat or a rabbit. Stereo cameras in the eyes and stereo microphones in the ears are complemented by two additional microphones (one inside the head and one in the tail) and by a sonar ranger in the nose. In the body, four light level sensors and two 'cliff sensors' are arrayed around the skirt, and many capacitive sensors are distributed across the inside of the body shell and upper head shell to sense direct human contact. Interoceptive sensors include twin accelerometers and battery state sensing. Apart from the wheels and the neck, additional servos drive rotation of each ear, tail droop and wag, and closure of each eyelid. The wheel and neck movements are equipped with feedback sensors (potentiometers for neck joint positions and optical shaft encoders for wheel speed). An on-board speaker is also available to generate sound output.

'I hope you missed me!'

In its pre-loaded autonomous mode, MiRo is controlled by a brain-inspired control system containing a layered control architecture alongside event-based centralized action selection mechanisms. MiRo provides a useful platform for embodied testing of theories and models of mammalian sensorimotor control, however, since MiRo resembles a companion animal or pet, it is also well suited for applications such as robot-assisted therapy where robots are used as substitutes for animals for therapeutic purposes such as reducing anxiety. MiRo therefore fulfils two roles, serving as a platform for scientific research and as a way of advancing biomimetic robotics towards useful applications.

Technical specification

The robots in the MiRo fleet in the Diamond are all of the second generation (the latest), which is known as MiRo-E, and this is the version of MiRo that we refer to in this wiki and the rest of the course.
For your reference, the technical specification for this model are given below.

Physical
Mass	3.3 kg (2.9 kg without battery pack)
Wheel track	164 mm
Wheel diameter	90 mm
Maximum forward speed	400 mm/sec

Power
Main battery	NiMH 4.8V 10Ah
Main battery life	typically 6+ hours active, 12+ hours standby

Sensors
Microphones	4×	16-bit @ 20kHz
Cameras	2×	1280×720 @ 15fps 140×360 @ 25fps 320×240 @ 35fps
Sonar	1×	Proximity sensor in nose (3cm up to 1m)
Touch	28×	14× in body, 14× in head; capacitive
Light	4×	Spread around body skirt
Cliff	2×	Front edge of body skirt
Motion	2×	1× opto sensor in each wheel (also back EMF)
Position	3×	1× position sensor in each body joint
Accelerometer	2×	1× in body, 1× in head
Voltage	1x	Battery voltage

Actuators & other output
Main wheels	2×	Differential drive
Body joints	3×	Lift, yaw, and pitch
Tail (wag/droop)	2×	Wagging (side-to-side) and droop (up-and-down) motions
Ears (rotate)	2×	Left and right ear rotate independently
Eyelids (open/close)	2×	Two eyelids open and close independently
Illumination	6×	RGB illumination LEDs shine through the body shell, three on each flank
Sound output	1×	Streaming audio digitised at 8kHz

Processing
P1 (Embedded)	3× STM32F030	ARM Cortex M0 @ 24MHz 8kB SRAM 64kB FLASH ROM
P2 (Embedded)	1× STM32H743	ARM Cortex M7 @ 400MHz 1MB SRAM 2MB FLASH ROM
P3 (On-board)	1× Raspberry Pi 3B+	ARM Cortex A53 Quad Core @ 1.4GHz 1GB LPDDR2 RAM 16GB uSD FLASH ROM Bluetooth, WiFi, USB expansion ports

MiRo homepage

MiRo has its own homepage, where you can learn more about how it's being used, the history of its creation and the people behind it. https://www.miro-e.com/

MiRo-E technical documentation

Consequential Robotics (the developers of MiRo) also maintain some general documentation on the MiRo and MDK, which you can access here.

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