I came across these websites and thought that others might be interested:
Evolution Robotics <-- These people have several software modules (vSLAM, ViPR, ESRP) that look pretty powerful.
FUSION Robotics <-- This person has made a software package he calls STROBO that seems to be pathfinding and localization software. I would guess it is MUCH cheaper than the products at the link above.
If anyone else knows of good sources for pathfinding software, vision based navigation, or similar topics, I’d love to hear about them.
Wow! The second site looks very promising. At 3.75x 2.5 inches in size the board would be a good fit to piggy back on the servo controller.
Coming in at less than 150.00 bucks for software and hardware thats not too bad.
This is in my opinion well worth alook into, very interesting.
GOOD FIND!
I’ve had pretty decent results with the CMU Cam2 for object and color recognition. As for navigation I’m using a NavStarII GPS board although I haven’t figured out the algorithim yet to correct DOD errors yet so location accuracy is about 1.5 meters.
Hehe, 1.5 meters would be very nice in an arial bot, but it’s not as nice with ground bots.
Wouldn’t that mean that you could see a 1.5m sheer drop-off as perfectly level ground?
How do you plan on handling errors such as that?
I saw something that you may be able to put to use in the last issue of Servo Magazine.
Dave Shinsel wrote an article about sensor fusion and control heirarchy in making a Robo-Magellan bot.
Well Nick at the moment the bot is in R&D phase so no sheer dropoffs to deal with. I only run it out in the yard right now. If I can’t succesfully compensate for the DOD induced errors with software then a differential reciever will be in order although they are about 600 bucks. As for designing a rover bot that can successfully navigate it’s environment, I am reading alot about Perception Control Theory (PCT). For AI in bots it is very essential that correct decsions be made or disaster is sure to strike. see(Murphy’s Law)
Just a note. GPS is usually less accurate in altitude than in latitude an longitude. This means that while the GPS system in use can get your bot within an Lat/Lon circle 1.5m across, in altitude, you might be off by a much larger factor.
Also, DGPS is not your only solution. You can go to something like an RTK based GPS, or you can get one that will pick up extra data from the Soviet GLASSNOS sats. But neither of those solutions is cheap either (both about $1000). So, yeah, with just standard civilian grade GPS, 1.5m is about as good as it will get.
I prefer a barometric altimeter to any GPS measurment of altitude. My Garmin 76CS has one and it’s extremly accurate. ±1ft. Looks like I have something else to add to the bot.LOL
Thanks for the mention Mike! Glad you like the price!
RoboRealm is free and may have some bugs since we’re adding new modules at a very rapid pace. If anyone finds any please let us know! We fix them quite rapidly.
Concerning the original post: there are a bunch of resources out there concerning vision. Have a look at roborealm.com/links.php for a list of open source vision based software that could be used for robotic applications. Probably the main two that we’ve seen used are OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision library) which has the most active online forum that we’ve seen with 16 thousand members (check Google) and CMVision (Color Object Recognition) by CMU which was used in an embedded robotic system … they don’t appear to be active anymore but the code is still available.
As a user of roborealm, I can assure anyone who has not used it will love it. It’s very very east to use! I am one of those people that like to learn just by clicking around the application. You can do this with Roborealm.
The main thing I like about it is the support for Parallax or Lynxmotion controllers.
The software is a work-in-progress as you mentioned, so there might be some issues, however, you still have the full functionality and there was nothing I couldn’t master using it. It works very well, infact I would love to see it grow with new features.
One question I do have is the COG display, I can’t see the x & y values displayed.
I guess I should say thanks for allowing us to prove what my previous post mentioned!
You are probably missing the verdana.gif (aka a font file) file in your RoboRealm folder. If it is not there go ahead and download RoboRealm again which should have that file.
Any suggestions to new features are always welcome and responded to!
