With the help of a Tektronix oscilloscope, you can now tell your iCub robot to stop bugging you and go outside to play. That’s because instead of needing a long-extension cord for power, the iCub robot now has a battery backpack – tested and optimized using a Tektronix oscilloscope and power probes – to keep the sensors on, the circuits powered up and motors turning.

About the size of a 4-year-old child, iCub has 53 motors that move the head, arms and hands, waist, and legs allowing it to crawl on all fours and sit up and balance. It can see and hear, has the sense of proprioception (body configuration) and movement (using accelerometers and gyroscopes) and it is the first robot with an artificial skin covering its whole body.

Challenge

Developers at the Istituto Italiano Di Tecnologia (IIT) needed to validate and troubleshoot a new battery backpack power supply system for the iCub robot, an open-source cognitive humanoid robot platform about the size of a four-year-old child.

Solution

To complete the project, IIT turned to a Tektronix MSO4104B oscilloscope with a TDP1000 differential probe, TCP0030 current probe and four TPP1000 probes along with decoder modules to measure analog signals, power characteristics and bus communications. The MSO4104B oscilloscope features 1 GHz bandwidth with a sample rate of 5 GS/s. It supports up to 4 analog channels and 16 digital channels. Since the digital channels are fully integrated into the oscilloscope, users can trigger across all input channels, automatically time correlating all analog, digital, and serial signals. With the addition of the appropriate power probes – from the wide cross-selection offered by the Tektronix – the MSO4000 series oscilloscopes are well-suited to power test applications such as the iCub battery backpack. For instance, the TCP0030 used by IIT is a high-performance, easy-to-use AC/DC current probe that provides greater than 120 MHz bandwidth with selectable 5 A and 30 A measurement ranges. It also provides low-current measurement capability and accuracy to levels as low as 1 mA.

Benefits

Using the Tektronix oscilloscope, IIT engineers were able to efficiently isolate problems, manage power spikes during start-up and characterize battery discharge. The ability to decode data streams proved vital to validating the CAN and I2C data across the three circuit boards used in the backpack’s design.

Download the complete application note to learn more: http://www.sjelectronics.co.uk/acatalog/iCub_Robot_Gets_Battery_Power.html

To see the complete range of Tektronix test equipment available from SJ Electronics: http://www.sjelectronics.co.uk/acatalog/SJ_Electronics_TEKTRONIX_582.html

Contact us for assistance with your power measurement and analysis applications:

 

SJ Electronics

3 Vernon Court, Henson Way

Telford Way Industrial Estate

Kettering, Northants, NN16 8PX

 

Tel: 0800 583 4455

Email: sales@sjelectronics.co.uk

Website: www.sjelectronics.co.uk