everybody it's no one from tested here and today we're gonna be building and
testing the Robo master s1 this is the new RC robot from DJI now you might know
DJI as the makers of drones multirotors gimbals cameras but not a lot of people
know that over in shenzhen they've been running the Robo masters competition for
the past couple years this is a massive event where students from universities
from all around China come together and basically build robots in this real
physical real time strategy game the robots are engineered with AI with these
blasters they go around these huge arenas and it's a massive massive event
and so this is the first consumer product it's an educational robot that's
inspired and based off of the lessons learned from the Robo masters
competition and it is of course a kit just look at this you've got tons of
parts there's the chassis the wheels the motors with built in speed controllers
you have the body plating there's the blaster there even some hip plates to
know when you're being hit and of course an fpv camera there's gonna be so
awesome let's get to building
so that was the build and first of all this was so fun to put together it took
about two hours all the tools from the screws this drivers all the cables are
packed in that box and instructions are are pretty clear there's a jig for these
wheels and actually on the side of these these are actually target plates behind
each of these chassis armor plates what you see in this light here is a sensor
pressure sensor as well as a light sensor so you can engage in some fun
combat and some tooling with other tanks it all connects and is controlled via an
app so there's a new Robo Master's app by DJI and from there you get as you
would expect fpv driving so have it loaded up right now and I found the
latency to be really really good it's using probably the same digital signal
technology over Wi-Fi either over through your router or direct connection
to the robot as the other DJI fpv camera systems and so very low latency and of
course you're not flying this several hundred meters away
this is gonna be contained driving around in your room or your backyard or
in some type of gymnasium I was able to pilot this completely just using fpv and
it's two sick controls so you have lateral movement as well as gimballed
movement you can see some of the gimbal movement here it's all analog you move
as slow as fast as you want and it turns right here but it's really that lateral
movement that really impressed me cuz as you can see
these are Mecca number wheels if you don't know what those are
they're basically a wheel design that has omnidirectional movement you can see
that along with this one axis of movement
these wheels don't actually pivot there's no system in place here they let
this the wheels actually turn individually and that's part of the
elegance of this design as opposed to at rational car or RC vehicle
you're not steering by turning the front two wheels left and right instead each
of these these wheels have a series of rollers and that allows for not only
lateral movement I can move this left and right and strafe essentially but
then a combination of different speeds and forward and backward movement from
each of these wheels allows for turning and the turning is super smooth the
whole drive system is super smooth I was shocked
turning this on on the slowest most basic speed house pontiff it was because
it's running these brushless motors and speed controllers from all the years of
experience that DJI has developing those technologies on their drones all of that
is inherited onto this Robo master s1 so very very satisfying driving experience
with the app or an optional control pad accessory and driving via fpv in fact I
they use the same type of mental gymnastics looked-after v and not look
at the vehicle because I have this running around the room and going all
different types of orientations now above the main chassis of which there
are those four armor plates there is this blaster system which is on the
gimbal and the blaster is really cool cos has dual functionality it can work
either as an infrared blaster system it fires just a little bit of a beam right
there or actually can fire these gel pellets and these gel pellets are very
soft they're not like BBS or not like airsoft
pellets they're almost like a little harder version of a Tapioca palek boba
milk tea pellet and so very easy to squish and you actually reconstitute
these by soaking them in water for up to four hours and put it in a hopper in the
back and then you can fit up to eight a four hundred of them and here and drive
them around and hit the other targets and their safety measures in place so
you can't in it very high no more than ten degrees up and down before you fire
one of these pellets well the most fun just using the infrared
laser from the front to go hit the other targets and speaking of targets there is
computer vision on the robot masters it's a camera here Karamazov that only
allows you to record video at 1080p 30fps to a micro SD card or to your
connected mobile device but also allows you to recognize human objects recognize
gestures the same kind of things that DJI drones could previously recognize
could follow you around but also recognize tracking markers so it
includes a set of these paper markers you set them up and it allows you to do
things like have a race whether it's a time trial where you have Li set up and
run around see how long it takes for you to capture each of these or we have
multiple roller masters you can actually then have a race a course and then drive
around find the targets and there even some targets allow for power-ups for
speed boosts and armor to really make it like Mario Kart but a physical vehicle
RC vehicle in real life it's so much fun just driving this around again the
control systems are super responsive and because there's analog controls I can
move as slow or as fast as I want but the robot masters s1 is also made as an
educational platform and that's I think their primary intent and so there is a
system in place for you to program movement actions program a little bit of
AI into the robot and it's super simple it uses either scratch or Python and
with scratch blocks it really is ass dragon drop they have parameters for the
computer vision parameters for the sensors for the the hit detection for
the orientation of the gimbal and you can do things like design Juke maneuvers
or if you have a pellet hit on one of the targets you can then have it spin
around and fire back in the other direction all sorts of different things
that you can command and we just basically scratched the surface of the
programmability of the Robo masters of course with every RC device one of the
considerations is battery life includes one battery with this and charge it
takes about an hour and a half it gives you about an hour of charge which I
found was plenty for driving this around the place where I wish I had more
battery life was when using the programming because I want to
debug the program the actions if I'm spending 15 or 20 minutes creating a
sequence I don't want to have the the Robo master off and on and switch it
back on and do a test and there's no virtualized version of it in the app yet
that I know of so it kind of sucks I need to leave this on while I run the
debug for the operations but I think they will sell extra batteries and for
driving around for going into some competition an hour of runtime is
actually pretty good all this right now I I'm impressed that they got all this
technology in on this kit that's super fun to build and all the technology onto
something that's basically five hundred dollars I can't imagine another company
putting out all this tech on this an RC device for that price I think that DJ's
getting a lot of benefit from all their engineering and all their experience
working on drones into putting it into a device like this I was kind of skeptical
going into this build why is DJ I'm making this RC vehicle
when their expertise expertise is in flying cameras these great drones that
can capture amazing video and it kind of makes us to share a lot of the same
basic technologies from the computer vision from the gimballed systems so the
motors and the speed controllers and fpv controlling and I'm having a ton of fun
with this again we've barely scratched the surface with robot masters and we're
gonna get another one of these units and do some actual programming and do some
trials and do a little bit of head-to-head competition with these and
we'll be back with a future in-depth test in the future but if you have
questions about the roller masters s1 and place them in the comments below I'd
love to answer them and I can't wait to get this back on the road
you