My first robot: Any ideas on how to do this?

Community General Discussions
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Hey everybody, this is my first post here. I'll be ordering the parts to make my first robot soon (within a week, hopefully), and I've had lots of ideas. I've had some experience building robots, but not real ones; only ones with Wiremod in Garry's Mod (A really fun modification of the Half-Life 2 source engine). I'm planning on making it be able to track an object (a transmitter) using 2 receivers that can measure signal strength and output it as a distance. Any ideas of what I can use for this? It'd need to be pretty accurate within 50 feet or so.

Another thing: Would a single Picaxe 28 board be able to handle doing what I said above and checking for obstacles with an SRF05 at the same time, or are they not powerful enough?

 

EDIT:

If there's nothing like that, I could probably use a speaker that emits a loud click every 5 seconds or so, and 2 speakers on the robot that act like ears on an owl; measure the time difference to get the origin of the sound...

 

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The 'speaker and two mics’

Welcome to the site. The ‘speaker and two mics’ setup you describe is basically exactly what the SRF05 does, only of course only in one direction – but mounting it on a servo takes care of that limitation. As far as tracking an object, one easy way to do it is to mount an infrared LED on the object to track, and then use IR sensors (aka phototransistors) on the robot to find it. I’m not sure if it’d work from 50 feet away – you might need to test and find out.

Dan

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With the speaker & mics, I
With the speaker & mics, I meant like a speaker somewhere away from the robot for it to find, not a rangefinder (so the robot can get its’ bearings to go in the right direction). I’ll be thinking of some other ways to do this during school; I don’t do much else… :slight_smile: