Figure 1: Jenny 5 grabbing a water bottle.
A robot builder by the name of Mihai Oltean has an ongoing humanoid robot project he has dubbed “Jenny 5”. Jenny 5 is inspired by the Johhny 5 robot from the movie Short Circuit. Jenny’s body is comprised of a base, flexible leg, two arms and a head. The base of the robot moves around on a pair of tank style tread that are driven by a pair of planetary gearmotors. The pair of gearmotors are contolled by a RoboClaw motor controller. The flexible leg is driven by a pair of linear motors that are in turn controlled by another RoboClaw motor controller. The arms feature a large number of degrees of freedom and are driven by 6 stepper motors. At the end of each arm is a gripper driven by a servo motor. The head of Jenny contains a webcam and ultrasonic sensors for measuring distance.
Jenny can be controlled remotely by any device with a web browser as the computer at the heart of the robot hosts a web server serving up an HTML5 control interface. The computer hosting the webpage also interfaces with the handful of micrcontrollers in the robot and sends commands to the RoboClaw motor controllers. Jenny 5 is primarly used as a teaching tool and the credits page lists a large number of students that have worked on it over the years.
We thank Mihai Oltean for posting the details of his build and for choosing to use RoboClaw motor controllers in the creation of his robot. More details and videos about the build can be found on the project’s webpage. The code used in the various microcontrollers and computer can be found at this Github link.