Tuesday, May 25, 2010

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...

3 comments:

  1. Are you planning to have the Robot Scan once at the beginning of the game (before moving) or are you planning to have it continually scan during the match?

    If you are planning on the latter then you are going to need to track the angle and coordinates of the robot base so you can translate the position of an object found with the ranger from robot centric coordinates to field centric coordinates.

    Also you may want to consider starting with two dimensional mapping then upgrading to three dimensional if it is necessary.

    Check out this video, it uses the laser sensor on the Neato XV-11 robotic vacuum and SLAM to map out a room.

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  2. Looks like I forgot the video

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zodC8EFvh7g

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  3. I will see how I will map it after I get the IR rangefinder in the mail and get it to work

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