MOVO hardware overview

This section provides a quick description of the basic components of MOVO

MOVO consists of a number of components. You can think of MOVO as made up of three main sections:

• Motion base
• Lower torso
• Upper torso

The motion base powers MOVO and allows MOVO to move horizontally and sense the presence of obstacles at ground level. The motion base consists of:

• Chassis, wheels, and wheel motors
• 2 Li-Ion Batteries and charging system
• Power distribution
• NUC Navigation PC, which serves as ROS slave
• 2 laser scanners
• Ethernet switch
• Lower skin panels

The lower torso of MOVO is responsible for allowing MOVO to raise or lower its height. This consists of:

• Linear actuator
• Linear actuator motor
• Linear actuator position sensor and limit switches
• Linear actuator support structure
• Middle skin panels

The upper torso of MOVO allows for vision, grasping of objects, and speech-based communication. The upper section consists of:

• 0, 1, or 2 Kinova robotic arms (JACO 6DOF or 7DOF)
• Pan-tilt unit (with Kinect camera / microphone unit)
• NUC Vision PC, which is the ROS master, running Ubuntu 14.04 and with all development tools installed. It contains
  • Memory
  • Hard drive
  • Wi-fi router
  • DHCP server
• Arm controller units
• “Dummy” base units for mounting JACO arms to MOVO and carrying power and controls to JACO arms.
• Audio amplifier and speakers
• Ethernet switch
• Human Machine Interface (HMI) panel
• Power distribution block
• Upper skin panels

The MOVO platform has interfaces for controlling MOVO, connecting to MOVO, and getting indications about status.

• MOVO Human-Machine Interface (HMI) panel
  This section describes the Human-Machine Interface (HMI) panel, located on the rear of the upper torso.
• MOVO charging port
  This section describes the charging port used to connect MOVO to its power supply and the indicators that display the charging state.
• LED panel
  This section describes the LED status indicators on the right hand side of the motion base of MOVO.
• Joystick control
  This section describes the joystick used for remote tele-operation of MOVO and the control mapping for the joystick.