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Step 5Testing
The next day after finishing it, I took the robot along to a robot event and tested it out by gently kicking a green ball along the floor and watching the robot following it where ever it went. It can go forward, left, right and it backs away if the ball comes towards it. I had one finger on the failsafe remote at all times.
It only shot off once when it liked the look of the green trees through the window. A quick tweak of the color filter's Hue setting fixed that.
Not a finished project by any means, but a great platform to have a bit of fun and test out all my odd ideas for sensors, etc.
If you have an older laptop lying around (about PIII 1Ghz) and any kind of PC driven speed controller then you can set this up fairly quickly. Make it as simple or as complicated as you wish. No real programming required, just tweaking of scripts, etc
My next steps are to add some sensors (ultrasonic and IR) to the robot and swap the heavy Lead-acid battery for a LIPO to ease some of the weight from the suspension.
I may have a stab and reverse Engineering the ball follow script and add the sensor inputs from the SCS-32 into the Roborealm program loop.
Remember the failsafe. This robot can move fast and is quite heavy. Could easily cause injury if it escapes and runs amok.
If you need any more detail, just ask. I will try to help in any way I can.
Have fun.
(For the video below, I modified the script to follow an orange ball as green balls don't work to well on grass. I wish I had taken a video from the robot event as they had large open floors where I kicked the ball off slowly and watched it roll a long way with the robot in hot pursuit !!)
It only shot off once when it liked the look of the green trees through the window. A quick tweak of the color filter's Hue setting fixed that.
Not a finished project by any means, but a great platform to have a bit of fun and test out all my odd ideas for sensors, etc.
If you have an older laptop lying around (about PIII 1Ghz) and any kind of PC driven speed controller then you can set this up fairly quickly. Make it as simple or as complicated as you wish. No real programming required, just tweaking of scripts, etc
My next steps are to add some sensors (ultrasonic and IR) to the robot and swap the heavy Lead-acid battery for a LIPO to ease some of the weight from the suspension.
I may have a stab and reverse Engineering the ball follow script and add the sensor inputs from the SCS-32 into the Roborealm program loop.
Remember the failsafe. This robot can move fast and is quite heavy. Could easily cause injury if it escapes and runs amok.
If you need any more detail, just ask. I will try to help in any way I can.
Have fun.
(For the video below, I modified the script to follow an orange ball as green balls don't work to well on grass. I wish I had taken a video from the robot event as they had large open floors where I kicked the ball off slowly and watched it roll a long way with the robot in hot pursuit !!)
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For someone with no experience using a Sabertooth speed controller, would you say that would be easier than using an Arduino UNO and motor controller?
Thanks! Awesome bot
Roborealm has an inbuilt control module for interfacing with the Sabertooth so there is nothing to learn for it, you just need to tweak some of the variables in the module to get the right responses.
The entire robot is controlled from RR, even tilting the camera up and down (via the Lynxmotion servo controller)
Roborealm really needs to be run on an onboard PC, if you are using an Ardunino, you could possibly use it as a control/sensor slave for the robot back to a base PC running RR.
Thanks
Would any typical laptop PC board work? What are the minimum system requirements for the board in a bot like yours?
Tom
This leads to faster and more accurate control of the robot.
If I was making the robot again, I would use a cheap Netbook running windows. as they are much easier to power and you can see the results on the Netbook screen.
You can still slave using openVNC to another laptop so you can see what it's doing and take control at a distance if you need to.
You are probably best to download the trial version of Roborealm and play around for a while with a webcam.
it is computer controled