I’ve had a long interest in robotics, and have gained a lot of theoretical knowledge about the field over the past years, but never really got my hands dirty with all the cool mechanical and electronic stuff. Thats why a few months ago I ordered the parts for my first real robot. Origionally it was going to be a walker, however I didn’t want to fork out lots of cash of something and find out I have no idea how to get it working, so instead I opted for a small rover.
]RobotShop Rover Chassis and Tracks/:m] ]Lynxmotion Pan and Tilt/:m] ]Arduino Duemilanove/:m] ]Lithium Backpack/:m] ]BlueSMiRF Bluetooth Modem/:m] ]Pololu Micro Servo Controller + Micro Motor Controller/:m] ]Sharp IR Range Sensors, Small and Large/:m] ]Textstar Serial LCD Display (not shown)/:m] ]ThingM BlinkM’s x 3/:m] ]Single Axis Gyroscope/:m] ]Triple Axis Accelerometer/:m] ]Digital Compass/:m]
I ordered these in stages, with my most recent purchase being the advanced sensors and wireless.
So far I have managed to get the robot moving around and avoiding obstacles by scanning its main IR sensor without the need to stop between sweeps, with the LED’s being used to visually represent the distances it see’s. Eventually I hope to use all the sensors, as well as a wireless link to my desktop pc, to perform localisation and mapping of my house. If I can pull this off then I plan on moving over to walkers and vision sensors, but I’ll have to save up for those .
Hopefully the Accelerometer will be used to detect when the rover is on slopes. As for the Gyro it will be used to support the compass to counteract any problems with EM interference from the motors. Other than that the real reason is because they are cool and I can play about with them to find out what purpose they can serve.
This looks like a nice little rover project! A small tracked robot is a great place to start too and it looks like you have a good plan for expansion. I’ll eventually be adding an accelerometer to my robot also, which will eventually be used to sense tilts and allow it to level its body for different terrains.
Unfortunately I haven’t done any work on this rover since last posting here, beyond checking all the sensors and bluetooth worked (which they do ). I’ve been distracted by another project, a modification for the game Total Annihilation.
The work I’m doing for this mod relates a lot to robotics as it involves creating an Inverse Kinematics library for the game, so that some if its more awesome mechs can walk as well as the phoenix and similar robots. So far the results have been rather promicing, and if all goes to plan I’ll be able to port the code over to Arduino and start building a real walking robot similar to that rendered in my display pic.
Here’s a video showing some the progress I’ve made. Only works on hexapods at the moment.
Skip ahead to 2:05 as the vid contains a lot of stuff done by others that isn’t related to my efforts.
.
