I have decided to name the vehicle MARC Robot, which stands for Military Automatic Reconasaince Combat Robot. It will mainly seek and destroy “enemies” as well as survey areas for troops or cover fire for ground soldiers.
The main armour will be made of 3mm aluminum sheeting. This isnt strong enough to take a “real hit” but will stand up to paintball shells and pellot gun ammunitions. Its main weapon will be at first a small soft pellot gun connected to a Pan and tilt capable of lifting roughly 2lbs. This will have full 360 degree rotation and 45 degree tilt up/down from center. Hopefully Evo can give me the details about his “tracking system” but he STILL hasnt responded to my PM.
Two cameras will be mounted on the vehicle, one 1.2GHZ camera with 15 LEDS encased inside the vehicle with a view of the outside through a clear lexan panel. The other will be a 2.4GHZ camera modified to fit to the pellot gun along with a pen laser pointer. The LM tracks will be used with GMH 12 Gearhead motors as locomotion and will have a small suspension system of foam tires to absorb some kind of shocks from rough terrain. A scorpion motor controller will operate everything connected to an ABB and SSC 32 via a PS2 controller. Operation range will be roughly 50m. The cameras will relay image back to a capture card connected to my PC if Evo can share with me some of his info on that, otherwise I will have manual shooting and connect the cameras to a TV both operational at 100ft. The Weapon will be controlled by a servo pulling and releasing the trigger. As long as it moves quickly I will have a sufficient amount of shots per every few seconds.
I am serious about this project and will be going pretty well small scale. If this project is a success I may want to go full scale later in the future.
Dirt cheap and not too bad if it gets destroyed by incoming fire…
Get an Osprey 100 or equivalent capture card. Very good and works with every application we have ever produced at work.
Also its Microsoft Approved so it means it can be used in Windows Media Encoder 9 and you can stream to Media Player over the internet with it.
There are also some very cheap motion detection packages you can lash on that would do away with your laser pointer. Whenever motion is detected just pan to the co-ords given and fire…
There are loads of more powerful cards available but the price always goes up to match. I’ve got 2 of these in my own machine.
What language are you going to try programming in?
There are always applications like Active Web Cam that will just given you a picture but I’m not sure how much more they are capable of. I know it can record when motion is detected but what else it can do Ive not checked
I was thinking of using roborealm so it can track objects. Im planning on looking at the computer as vision and moving the robot with a PS2 controller. Im not sure If I will be able to have the program also adjust the servos to the posotioning of the object being tracked. This is a bit too advanced for me. I will be controlling everything mannually for now, but Im sure after doing that I will want something more reaiable.
Guess what? Roborealm actually has a plugin to send command directly from the video tracking to the servo on an SSC-12. It also has numerous other plugins for the Phidget USB servo controller.
The last time I talked to them, I heard they were working on a plugin for the SSC-32 as well.
It’s all on their site, you just have to search around. Some stuff is hard to find.
The osprey card comes with drivers and a sample capture app so you can get up and running quickly…
Personally I use Windows Media Encoder 9 as its free from Microsoft, It saves to WMV files which are high quality and above all else, its one of teh few capture applications that can give full-speed preview while capturing. Most applications lose the preview.
I think the important word in that paragraph was FREE…
Actually you are doing similar to what I eventually intend.
Im writing some control software to run my bot off my PDA rather than a PS2 controller but I will be sending video back to the PC for much the same reasons. I may do a bit of motion detection as well.
I’ve been recommended to use IRPD to detect objects but I’d like to try the Vision route first. If its humanoid then try and be as humanoid as possible. We dont sense objects near to us (well not all of us) we see them, hear them or feel them, sometimes smell.
Its not going to be until the end of this semester of school, So hopefully sometime in June I will have the money and the time I have already downloaded roborealm to use with my usb cam to get used to it and I acrually did see some servo stuff they have on there for other applications. If tehy get oen for an ssc-32 it’d be great. I just hope there is no real programming involved.
just found it, that looks impressive, im going to download and play leter this evening. I might be able to hook that into the SSC-32 code I’ve already written in .NET and get something going.
It has a few features that would be of use. The first is that it can support and control devices. Unfortunately SSC-32 is not one of them at the moment and I’ve not looked too deep so I dont know how involved writing that control would be.
The second is that it can open a serial port and send commands that you tell it to. I havent had time to investigate how clever these commands could be.
The third I can see is that it has the ability (and samples) to open a Pipe to a VB application. A pipe is a type of software connection between 2 or more applications. It sends a copy of the currently displayed image thru the pipe for you to do with as you wish. For example you could set roborealm to motion detect. It would then send images with the motion detect data on them. You could look at this data and decide what to make the robot do.
The third option is possibly the most powerful but would rely on you having a reasonable ability for coding.
I had a scout around their website and only found information relating to a Mini-SSC which is an eight channel unit and unless I’m mistaken nothing to do with the LynxMotion SSC’s
Do you have any further information to hand as I am interested as well in the package. It seems very versatile…
If not I was considering talking to Laureatus to see if there is any mileage in getting some of the functions exposed in SEQ. That way we could use Pipes or Winsock to talk to an intermediate app that would forward them to SEQ…
I believe that the Lynxmotion SSC-32 will respond to commands for the Scott Edwards SSC, as will a number of other controllers. The Scott Edwards product sort of set the standard for serial servo control, I guess, and there’s quite a lot of backward compatibility out there, so far as other peoples’ products using the same command set.
It’s often implemented as a subset of the “normal” command mode, giving you basic positional control without access to more advanced features, such as servo speed or group movement.
From the description of the Mini-SSC I guessed there may be some relationship but the current implementation only provides control over 8 (0 - 7) servos as against the 32 of the SSC-32.
It also only appears to provide one position. As the SSC requires a Sequence of Positions to make a movement it did not seem to be and available feature.
The one thing I did notice about the roborealm system is that those interfaces that are fully supported all support a much higher level command system. Commands like MOVE, ROTATE etc as in Lego Mindstorms etc. As most robots built around the SSC’s have unique libraries of commands built by the robots designer and usually only functional only the robot in question.
This is why I was going to talk to Laureatus. If we had the ability to send the name of the sequence to be played from our intermediate application, then SEQ could fetch the named sequence from the database and play it.
The designer would just need to write a sequence in SEQ, name it and call that name from his app.
hmmm. Im not sure, I was tinkering with the filters and got an understanding on how to filter out certain colors but not sure how to initiate any tracking sequence on it?
I have already downloaded roborealm to use with my usb cam to get used to it and I acrually did see some servo stuff they have on there for other applications. If tehy get oen for an ssc-32 it’d be great. I just hope there is no real programming involved.
