Nano RP2040 Connect – DIY Database

Team Ikaro is a vibrant group of high school students from the Pacinotti Archimede Institute in Rome, sharing a strong passion for electronics and turning heads in the world of robotics! Specializing in Soccer Lightweight games (where robot-soccer players compete to score goals on a miniature field), they clinched the first place at the Romecup 2024 and won Italy’s national Robocup in Verbania earlier this year – earning the right to compete in the world championships in Eindhoven, where they placed third in the SuperTeam competition.

The brains behind the bots

Utilizing the versatile Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, the team has crafted highly efficient robots that feature ultrasound sensors, PCB boards, a camera, four motors, a solenoid kicker and omni-directional wheels, all meticulously assembled in the school’s FabLab.

Mentored by professor Paolo Torda, Team Ikaro exemplifies the spirit of innovation and teamwork bringing together three talented students: Francesco D’Angelo, the team leader, focuses on system design and mechanics; Flavio Crocicchia, the software developer, ensures the robots’ brains are as sharp as possible; Lorenzo Addario specializes in camera software, making sure the robots can “see” and react swiftly on the field. Their combined efforts have led to a seamless integration of hardware and software, and established a foundation of passion and ambition for future success in their careers.

Future goals

After their first taste of global competition, Team Ikaro is determined to continue refining their robots, leveraging every bit of knowledge and experience they gain – whether in the classroom, lab, or live challenges. At Arduino, we are proud to sponsor such brilliant young minds and look forward to seeing what they will accomplish next!

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Robotics kits like the Screwless/Screwed Modular Assemblable Robotic System (SMARS) are great tools for learning more about how electronics, mechanics, and software can combine to perform useful tasks in the physical world. And in his latest project, Edge Impulse’s senior embedded software engineer Dmitry Maslov shows how he was able to take this platform and give it both speech recognition and Wi-Fi control capabilities using an Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect.

Constructed from an array of 3D-printed parts and eight servo motors, the SMARS Quad Mod robot is a small, blocky quadruped that uses two LiPo battery cells, a step-down converter, and an IO expansion board to move based on simple directional commands such as “forward” and “left,” among others. Normally, these would come from an IR remote or a preprogrammed sequence, but by leveraging AI at the edge, it can respond in real-time to audible commands. And to achieve this, Maslov imported a dataset containing many samples of people saying directions along with background noise before training a keyword spotting model on it.

Once exported as a C++ library, the model was embedded into the robot’s sketch. Thanks to the RP2040’s dual-core architecture, the first core continuously reads new data from the microphone, performs inferencing, and sends the result to the second core when available. Then when the value is received, the other core maps the direction to a sequence of leg movements.

For more information about this project, you can check out Maslov’s tutorial on Hackster.io and see its dataset/model here in the Edge Impulse Studio.

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