I designed and built this vehicle as a senior project.
The vehicle is loosely based on the army MarcBot, one of the first sugv's, but with some upgrades specially in the sensors, GUI and control platform.
The main purpose of this vehicle was to prove that was possible to design, build and test a fully functional sugv under 3 months and with a extremely limited budged (under 1000€)
We achieved this by using comercially available platforms and a rapid prototyping development.
Since our main objective was not a full commercial product, we were lax on the robustness of the build, but the vehicle worked great during the field test.
The main components are:
Mechanical arm based on hobby servos
RC 4×4 crawler chassis
.net microframework compatible board
WiFi communications
Wireless camera
GPS
accelerometer
Gas sensor
Temperature sensor
Laptop base station
Some of the insteresting features are a safe mode that detects if the vehicle lost connection and tries to find his way home (without obstacule avoidance) and protects his arm by lowering it and entering lock down mode.
The GUI has a HUD type so the user can always keep the eyes on the road at all times.
Concept diagram
GUI screenshot
I will put more media during time and code, feel free to comment and ask questions. Check the link for additional information and the build log (still in the making)
Control method: WiFi
CPU: ARM7
Operating system: .netmf
Power source: 2x 7.2v 5500mha battery
Programming language: C#
Sensors / input devices: GPS, camera, Ultra Sound, temperature sensor, gas sensor
Cool robot! Neat you can reach up with the arm and see more.
I write C# for a living but kind of discounted the .net mf for a micro controller since I am sure it uses lots of resources. Also, kind of nice to have a hobby which doesn’t feel like I am at work. What a great senior project…
You are right about the resources part, it has a big overhead for the libraries but the fact that it could be fully integrated in a solution in visual studio made this solution perfect for the time we had.
I also work full time as a C# developer, that was why I thought this would be the perfect tool for rapid prototyping.
Hi, can you share more information on porting .NET Micro Framework in any ARM device? Izit possible to port in raspberry pi? or any arm dev recomended that we can built from scratch?
Haven’t tried yet since we are now focused on a educational/comercial version of the Hound which will not be in .netmf at first.
Fez Panda II comes already with the preloaded .netmf and a couple of proprietary libraries from GHI that helps to interface with a lot of components like ethernet adapter, etc.
Thanks for the informartion. Will dig more into it this weekend and try on pi. Sound like RTOS or customize kernel to me but .netmf is not a OS i am curious ^^
