New to robotics, but I am a programmer in day to day life, so not new to most of the technology. Although a programmer’s background doesn’t include much in the way of hardware, so this will be a learning experience.
What I’m looking at creating is a remote control robot with video feedback for exploration. For the curious, this robot will be exploring a tortoise burrow that extends… well, some distance underground. I can’t get in there myself to see how far down it goes, but I can’t see the bottom (although I’ve tried squeezing in there and even went as far as attaching a camera to a pole and using the timer function to grab shots). But the origins are somewhat beside the point.
I have a small wireless camera and light source already, now I’m just looking for the base. The A4WD1 Combo Kit for RC seems to be ideal, and from what I can tell, the only additional things I’d need would be battery and charger. Am I missing anything?
At this point I’m planning on a stationary mount for the camera, so the only remote control necessary would be for the robot’s motion itself. Later I may add something like a pan and tilt mount, requiring additional control. And, of course, once I have gotten my feet wet with the simple exploration bot, I suspect that I will expand the bot to chase and annoy my dogs, maybe autonomously. But that’s later.
The other question I have is in regards to the capabilities of the A4WD1 rover. The burrow that will be explored has a few steep inclines, as well as rough terrain. Is this rover as unstoppable as it looks, or will I run into issues if the terrain is too rough? How much of an incline can teh rover navigate? In the interest of protecting investment, I will most likely have a rope or wire to the robot so that I can pull it back out of the burrow if necessary, so this isn’t crucial – but it would be nice if the rover could handle the burrow without difficulties.
I don’t really have any sort of good answers or suggestions at the moment, however a good thought might be to use the recovery rope double as a tether that can both supply power and make it a lot easier to get video back out of the burrow.
A power source isn’t something I’d considered for the tether, but I like the idea.
As far as getting video back out, the camera I currently have is wireless, and I’ve done some minor experimentation with transmission distances. The receiver was picking up a clear signal at pretty decent distances, though it may be an issue once the camera is underground a bit. If that does prove to be an issue I’ll need to get a different camera.
In the interest of the tortoise, you need to think out your project carefully. The bot needs to be fully retreavable, as if it gets stuck in a passage, then you may have blocked the tortoise’s exit and effectivly killed it. Retrevial efforts could also cause a passage collapse with the same fatal result. In the past similiar projects have been discussed. You may want to a forum search for words like “inspection”, “duct”, and “sewer” might find the post. Building bots is fun and interesting, but sometimes there are better solutions for what needs to be done. The below $400 inspection equipment might be better (as well as cheaper) and safer for the critter than a bot.
Exactly. Using a small cable or rope for a recovery tether is a good idea. And if you find a cheap joystick or gamepad that uses potentiometers on the controls, it’s easy to wire those up to the motor controller to use as control inputs.
As far as the rover, they are as tough as they look. You would really only be limited with very high peaks in the terrain that the rover would get hung up on. Or very steep inclines. Other than that, it could carry a camera no problem.
And zoomkat is right. You don’t want to kill the poor thing. Is this an abandoned burrow or does the tortoise live inside it? If it’s in there, you would likely scare it horribly by sticking anything inside. You’d be best to leave it be.
Yes, the tortoise is in the burrow. However the tortoise is a sulcata. The rover is considerably smaller than the tortoise, and the tortoise is extremely strong for his size. I have no doubts that even if the bot was left in the burrow, the tortoise would still be able to push his way out.
This isn’t a wild tortoise, so he’s pretty used to me bothering him on occasion. I’ll also point out that I’m in Tucson. The ground here is very hard, so the chances of a collapse are very small.
However I’m also not unreasonable. The pipe inspection kit from the prior link does look like it would work well (and there’s even a Harbor Freight in Tucson, to my surprise). So I’ll look into that for burrow explorations, but as yet I’m still leaning towards the exploration bot approach. Planning this out thoroughly is my intention, of course, thus my thread.
I do have a strong interest in robotics, though, so I’m probably still going to get the rover here, even if it won’t be used for burrow exploration. So maybe some general questions can be addressed. With a battery pack, is the kit I mentioned all I’d need to build a remote control rover? Would there be additional electronics needed for things like a pan and tilt mount, or possibly armatures?
Me being cheap, I’d get the below B/W IR cam (currently on sale at HF for $30) and attach it to the end of a very flexable spring type drain cleaner. You can get the drain cleaners at walmart, lowes, home depot, etc. inexpensivly, and usually come in 15’ and 25’ lengths, which you could easily join for longer lengths. This way you could easily slide the IR cam down the passage with minimum impact and disturbance.
Just to address one of your earlier questions about what the rover can cope with. I just did a quick test with mine as far as the angle goes and the limiting factor was it’s center of gravity ( note mine has quite a lot mounted fairly high ) so it would keep going up an increasing incline till it flipped over backwards ( well over 45 degrees ).
If your camera isn’t night-vision equipped, you may want to consider some illumination. I picked up an very small LED flashlight for my car at NAPA auto parts for about $3.50. It has 9 extremely bright LEDs and runs on on 3AA batteries…~5V (Which is nice because you will probably have a 5v lead handy somewhere on the board). It puts out enough light to hurt your eyes if you look directly at it
Also, don’t overestimate the powers of your camera. For our final project in school, we’re making use of a wireless camera that gets very good transmission distances for line-of-sight transmission, but when you start adding things like walls and doors into the mix, the distance falls off pretty quickly. Depending on how much ground you have to go through, and how many twists/turns the tunnel has, you may lose video (the same with remote control, so a recovery/control tether is a very good idea as others have said).
Good luck!
EDIT:
Sorry I just re-read your original post and saw that you mentioned you have a light source. Just ignore what I said above. (I’ll learn to read more carefully)
