Print PDF
Favorite
Email
I'm an Electrical Engineering major and each year my college's branch of IEEE competes in a student hardware competition. Last year's competition was inspired by the natural disasters in Haiti and Chile (the competition was held one week after the earthquake in Japan). This was a very large project that was tackled by a group of people. I was the programmer of the group but also helped with some of the sensors that the arduino would be directly interfacing with. I will only cover those parts that i was involved with, however i will briefly talk about the other parts so that readers can get a better understanding of the scale of the competition.
The playing course was meant to imitate a hotel that had been damaged during an earthquake. As seen below there were 4 rooms with a central hallway. In each room there could be up to 4 "Victims", as well as various pieces of "debris" and a "Hazard". The victims were composed a 3" PVC cap with a magnetic coil, and an status indicator LED. the debris was various sizes of 2X4 & 1X1 lumber painted white. The hazard was a large magnetic field at a different frequency then the victims.One of the biggest challenges was being able to navigate the course with the possibility of your path being blocked by debris. That's where I came in!
This is my first instructables(hopefully not the last). Unfortunately I wasn't really planning to write it at the time ( I was to focused on the completion) so I don't have any pictures of the robot under construction.I finally have some time to do a write up and the Microcontroller contest was just the incentive i needed to complete it. I'd really appreciate any comments and suggestions, and I'll try to answer any questions you have. If you like my instructables please vote for me in the Microcontroller and/or Make It Move contest!
The playing course was meant to imitate a hotel that had been damaged during an earthquake. As seen below there were 4 rooms with a central hallway. In each room there could be up to 4 "Victims", as well as various pieces of "debris" and a "Hazard". The victims were composed a 3" PVC cap with a magnetic coil, and an status indicator LED. the debris was various sizes of 2X4 & 1X1 lumber painted white. The hazard was a large magnetic field at a different frequency then the victims.One of the biggest challenges was being able to navigate the course with the possibility of your path being blocked by debris. That's where I came in!
This is my first instructables(hopefully not the last). Unfortunately I wasn't really planning to write it at the time ( I was to focused on the completion) so I don't have any pictures of the robot under construction.I finally have some time to do a write up and the Microcontroller contest was just the incentive i needed to complete it. I'd really appreciate any comments and suggestions, and I'll try to answer any questions you have. If you like my instructables please vote for me in the Microcontroller and/or Make It Move contest!
Remove these ads by
Signing UpStep 1The Sensors
During our early meetings, we decided that the most efficient way to navigate was to follow the wall around the course, To do this we needed a way to keep track of not only the wall but any obstacles that could be placed anywhere around the course. We build a lot of robots and other project at my college so we know quite a bit about sensors. What we needed was a way to accurately measure the distance to the walls.
We considered both Infrared and Ultrasonic sensors, There are infrared sensors that can read the distance that we needed, however we didn't know many details about the paint that was to be used on the course walls or ambient lighting, We were afraid that this could through off our distance readings. We decided on Ultrasonic sensors. There are dozens if not hundreds of ultrasonic sensor, but one of the most well known is the PING sensor from Parallax. We looked at several models but finally decided on the PINGs because they have the shortest minimum read distance of 2cm. This way we could hug the walls pretty closely.
The first thing we needed to do was figure out how many sensors we needed. We determined that we would need 2 sensors to square up against the wall. we also needed 2 sensors on the front for obstacle avoidance and navigation. We would also need sensors on each side of the robot to locate the victims. One of the requirements when finding the victims was to announce the victims location on an invisible X and Y gird in each room. To do this we would need to be able to figure out our distance to each of the 4 walls.(really we could do this with only 2 walls but 4 walls provided some redundancy.) In the end we used 7 sensors, 2 on the front, 2 on the right side, 2 on the back and 1 on the left side (we only needed 1 on the left to provide distance to the walls, the pairs are used together to make sure the robot is square against the wall either while turning or driving straight).
We considered both Infrared and Ultrasonic sensors, There are infrared sensors that can read the distance that we needed, however we didn't know many details about the paint that was to be used on the course walls or ambient lighting, We were afraid that this could through off our distance readings. We decided on Ultrasonic sensors. There are dozens if not hundreds of ultrasonic sensor, but one of the most well known is the PING sensor from Parallax. We looked at several models but finally decided on the PINGs because they have the shortest minimum read distance of 2cm. This way we could hug the walls pretty closely.
The first thing we needed to do was figure out how many sensors we needed. We determined that we would need 2 sensors to square up against the wall. we also needed 2 sensors on the front for obstacle avoidance and navigation. We would also need sensors on each side of the robot to locate the victims. One of the requirements when finding the victims was to announce the victims location on an invisible X and Y gird in each room. To do this we would need to be able to figure out our distance to each of the 4 walls.(really we could do this with only 2 walls but 4 walls provided some redundancy.) In the end we used 7 sensors, 2 on the front, 2 on the right side, 2 on the back and 1 on the left side (we only needed 1 on the left to provide distance to the walls, the pairs are used together to make sure the robot is square against the wall either while turning or driving straight).
| « Previous Step | Download PDFView All Steps | Next Step » |
If you are still using the Victor 884 motor controller then you will need to change those Serial.write commands to a cooresponding AnalogWrite or a command from the servo library.
If you want to view the outputs of the pings then past the following code into the PING subroutine between the line that says distcm[x] = cm; and delay(1);
Serial.print(durat[x]);
Serial.print(" uSec ");
Serial.print(distin[x]);
Serial.print(" Inchs ");
Serial.print(distcm[x});
Serial.println(" cm");
this data coming out will screw up a serial motor controller like my sabertooth, but your PWM based Victor will be just fine.