
- VECTOR ROBOT ANKI HOW TO
- VECTOR ROBOT ANKI FULL
It takes quite some stimulation to make him move out.
Careful calibration of when Vector moves out: As many Vector owners initially complained, Vector can be generally seen sitting on the charger. Given that it is extremely hard to replace Vector’s battery, in my opinion, this is a good engineering decision. Every engineering decision has trade-offs. While this limits the time Vector can spend outside his charger, it does increase his life. Thus Anki ensured that Vector’s battery lives a longer life by discharging it to about 40%. LIBs can perform reasonably to ~3 Volts at which the battery can be considered 100% discharged. Shorter depth of discharge: I think Anki engineered Vector to use a shorter depth of discharge by making Vector return the charger at 3.65 Volts. Why do we see reasonably good performance from Vector’s battery? Here are some reasons I could think off: If I were to extrapolate this curve, I would imagine that most Vector’s would perform satisfactory for at least the 5 years of active usage. And that is pretty impressive for a gadget which has been under constant use. In those 20 months, Vector’s battery went down from 27.5 minutes to 21 minutes, which is about 25%. While I don’t know how frequently the green Vector was used (since I bought it over ebay), I can certainly vouch that the blue Vector has been in active use for the last 20 months. The green Vector shows a discharge cycle length of 28 minutes (from 9:46 AM to 10:14 AM) and 27 minutes (from 10:41 AM to 11:08 AM). The blue Vector shows a discharge cycle length of approximately 21 minutes (from 10:15 AM to 10:36 AM). The green curve represents the Vector I bought off eBay. The blue curve represents the Vector I originally owned, and therefore can be compared directly with the battery drain observed in October 2018. First let us examine how Vector performed when I first bought it. This program uses the Anki Vector SDK to monitor several metrics and stream in to Wavefront, a service that offers solutions for enterprises to observe metrics at scale.Įvaluation of battery life. Measurements were made with my open source program, available on git. I re-examined the battery drain of the same Vector, along with the additional one I bought in June 2020. When I first received my Vector in October 2018, I had examined the battery drain rate in this article. Anki manufactured all Vector’s in one lot, so both these Vector batteries are expected to have an age of ~22 months in June 2020 (Assuming a manufacture of ~August 2018). I bought another used Vector of eBay in April 2020. I have owned this Vector since it was shipped to me in October 2018. One Vector was bought as part of the initial Anki Kickstarter program in August 2018. We experimented with two Vector robots on how long Vector can venture out of his charger before having the need to return back. So how do we measure how Vector’s batteries performed over time? When Vector was released, Tom’s guide reported seeing an interval of 45 minutes before Vector found the need to go back to his charger. VECTOR ROBOT ANKI FULL
As an example, if you discharged your battery to 60% of full capacity, you can double the number of discharge cycles to 1000. However, there are a lot of variables here, such as the conditions under which the battery operated, such as, the temperature, the current drawn, extend of discharge cycle, etc. To quote them, the expected life of a LIB is 2–3 years or 300–500 100% discharge cycles.
VECTOR ROBOT ANKI HOW TO
Battery University has a very nice article on how to prolong the life of LIBs. The high energy density lets manufacturers such as Anki pack a ton of energy in small gadgets such as the Vector. LIBs are popular because they have a very high energy density and a long battery life. Hence the number of discharge cycles is a measure of how long Vector can live.īut what is Vector’s battery? The most common batteries used in cellphones, laptops, tablets, and other electronic gadgets are the Lithium Ion Batteries (LIBs). But, if the battery dies, so does Vector. Hence the duration of the discharge cycle is a key measure of Vector’s performance. A Vector which cannot be outside his charger for more than five minutes is not interesting any more. Assuming that Vector ventures out 2–3 times a day, that implies 2–3 battery discharge cycles daily hence the concern that the battery would wear off in some time. If the battery runs low, Vector needs to return back to his charger and thus all the excitement is over. And whenever he ventures out, Vector must live on his battery. While Vector is usually found sitting on his charger, his most interesting behavior is when he ventures out. The main reason behind this is unlike the previous consumer robots manufactured by Anki, Vector is expected to be always powered ON.
Vector’s battery has been a major discussion point right from the moment Anki introduced it (Vector is now owned by Digital Dream Labs).