Robot Perception Part 1

I have several ideas on how to carry out with this, I am first trying out IR Rangefinders. The IR Rangefinder is mounted on 2 servos, 1 rotating it side to side, the other up and down. The IR Rangefinder will scan an area and save it into an array of floats or doubles (depends on how accurate IR Rangefinders are) and then send that array to an external processor that will process that data. There will be simple trignometry done on that data (don't worry, I already got the algorithm) then return the X, Y and Z coordinate of the point. Then that vertex can be used to generate a 3D image or be processed even farther for robot logic. The major down side is the time it takes to get the data and the noise and it will not work for moving objects. That is a HUGE downside. I have several ideas using that basic principle: several of them working together, 1 scans on one axis all around the area and the other one can scan the area with an object detected in dept. Now those are some very basic ideas, but I still think that it will not be the best way to handle robot perception in a quick and fast dynamic world. Now there is another similar method of robot perception, but I will go into it in the next post...

Ordered The IR Rangefinder

My mentor ordered the Sharp IR Rangefinder on Sparkfun today, hopefully it comes this week. Got the servos to work correctly without any problems, I am so stoked to get the IR to work and send some data to the PC.

Start Of A New Blog...

So this is my blog on the progress of the little competition I came up with here. I have separated the big project into three parts: Robot Perception, Robot Logic, and Robot Locomotion. Pretty much perception is the robot's eyes and ears, logic is the mind and locomotion is putting it all together and actually doing the actions. So I am focusing on the perception first, and I ran into a simple stupid problem; I could not get the servo to work. I tried to get it to work for a week and I just asked on chief delphi, a great forum, then I got it fixed in no time... Apparently I needed jumpers... No I got the servos to work and this week, my mentor is ordering a Sharp IR Rangefinder online for me to use. My goal is to render a 3d image of an object using the servos and IR rangefinders. Sounds complicated, but I can get it done in a week or two as long as I don't run into stupid problems like I did with the servos not working... The IR rangefinder will scan the area and get an array of distances and then it will calculate the actual distance and coodinates of the point and send that data to a PC using a serial connection. The PC will render the 3d image based on the coordinates. That program will be programmed in C++ using OpenGL and SDL or SFML libraries. I already have a prototype of the program already coded up, I made the z coordinates random so its a trip to look at it for long. Well I hope to finish this by June 10th...