Lego Boost Kinetic AR working

Hi Community,

I’ve found that Lego Boost Kinetic AR Prototyping has been added to TUTORIALS recently and gave it a try.
Since I already had vuforia spatial edge server set up and running on my Mac, I only had to add vuforia spatial robotic addon to “vuforia-spatial-edge-server/addons/”, execute “npm install”, and run the server by “node server” as instructed.

Here are some points that I struggled with to run my lego boost properly.

  1. I needed to rotate the image target image on Lego boost several times to find the correct orientation. If it’s not placed appropriately, Lego set off to incorrect direction.

  2. I was lucky that my Lego boost moved basically fine with the default parameter settings in “lego-boost in Manage Hardware Interfaces”. I’ll try with different parameter settings when I have time but it will require some trial and error to find the meaning of some parameters.

  • “boostSpeed” : At which speed I want the lego boost to go?
  • “wheelSeparation” : I’m assuming this means distance from center of one wheel to center of another wheel.
  1. When I run it for the first time, I was too close to the target and that caused my path and points to move with Lego boost.
    20200509_114004
    Then Anna gave me the advice to keep some distance from the target to prevent the slam algorithm to detect my robot as the background. It worked all fine when I stand about 3.2 feet away from the target.
    Final Reslut movie of Lego Boost Kinetic AR at home

The set up I used is below.
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Vufora Spatial Edge Server running on macOS Catalina(10.15.4)
Vuforia Spatial Topolbox running on iPhone 8
Lego Boost in Tank form
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1 Like

Hi @Takaaki!
Thank you very much for sharing your results in the community.

Some updates related to your main issues:
I have incorporated instructions on the tutorial in order to set the proper orientation on the image target.

I will also add some guidance on adjusting the parameters in the configuration interface. But for now your two assumptions are correct.

  • “boostSpeed” : At which speed I want the lego boost to go
  • “wheelSeparation” : I’m assuming this means distance from center of one wheel to center of another wheel.

Note that changing the speed of the boost may cause variations in the motion as well.

Thanks for sharing a gif with the drifting! As you mention, this is an issue that will happen if the camera of the phone is too close to the robot. The tracking algorithms will consider the robot part of the ground plane and if the robot moves, the content will be moved with it.

It is great to see your final result working properly!

If you want to play more with it: From here, you can now link the nodes from each checkpoint to other tools or hardware around you, so that when the robot reaches certain checkpoint, other things can get triggered.