I was impressed with your racers, made me want to do my own now i was thinking about how close you could get them to the wall,have you tryed putting proportoinal responce into the code, something like
x=distance from wall on right;
y=distance from wall infrount;
z=100-((y+x)/10)
turn Z amount.
I made a wall follower once for university and the idea was it would always stay 3cm away from wall and follow it. i found the type of forumula above was fairly easy and produced good results,might make it more fluid.
if you have something like excel or matlab you can even find the best turning curves etc.
Anyways great project and i liked the videos alot.
Well - to put it short; I think one thousand nerds out there have tried to make something like wall racers / Microcontroller on an old RC. But failed because they thought they could calculate the way out of things / predict etc like the robots they have experience from.
The thing is; These things (specially the cheap ones) steer like a numb fish, react like a drunk fish, and whip around like fish on speed in a heavy stream. It is NOT like a nice slow little robot. You cannot transmit formulas from “ordinary robots” that behave nice to these things, they will bang into the wall and act crazy if you try. It has to be formulas on how to steer a numb, drunk fish - on speed, in a heavy stream
But I will release both code and how-to’s asap. I will release a very simple base-version that works (100% the one on the videos, and possibly more videos to come) - and then you can have all the fun in the world by trying different formulas - they take an afternoon to build, and are very cheap
A Fishy Tale You evidently have most experience, so how exaclty DO you steer a drunk, numb fish on speed in a heavy stream? Is it anything like trying to steer a frightened sheep towards the edge of a cliff while wearing your wellington boots?
Realy like the fact that you have taken radiocontrolled cars and made them childproof, radiocontrolled cars that doesn’t drive into thing that’s definetly something I think a lot of parents would like and that way they also last longer
Have you thought about hidding the SRF05 sensors indside the car, can’t quite come up with a way to hide ultrasonic sensors inside the cars, I can only think of a way to do it with infrared sensors.
Cant you place the Cant you place the ultrasonic sensors inside and cover it with a heavy spaces metal cloth like they do on top of the sensor and maybe paint it so it doesnt look as bad?
I would assume that as long I would assume that as long as it has holes for sound to go in and out it should be ok. The more you block it the more of a chance that you will get a bad reading. If you put something in front I would try to make sure it is as close as possible to the sensor and that the holes line up if possible. I would just drill two holes and have the sensor peek through.
I made some similar robots a while ago. I’ll try and post a video of them. They are designed to race around a track, in other words they are doing wall avoiding so when you make a track with walls on the inside and outside they will go around and around. I made the robots myself, they are differential steering with a body made from laser cut polycarbonate. I used the sharp IR rangefinders for navigation and have four on each robot, two forward facing and two side facing. They also have four bumber switches, one pair in front and the other at the rear.
I made them because I occasionally run kids workshops about robots and I wanted an activity that was fun but didn’t involve building or programming so I made some racing robots. The controller (A PIC 18 device) has eight potentiometers attached (as well as the sensors) and these can be used to control the behaviour. Basically I can give one to a group of kids and tell them to experiment with the settings and get the robot to race around the track as fast as possible. The controller also has a mode select switch so you can have several different operating modes and I have included (but not written code for yet) a pair of servo pulse outputs so you can use the controller on an RC car instead of a diff steer bot. I was thinking of also using these ports to hook up an RC helicopter gyro so I could control the rate of turn more easily (espescially useful on slippery floors)
My robots are FAST, not quite as fast as a good RC car but certainly to fast for most tracks (there is a speed setting so you can tune the motor power) They work best on carpet where they get the most grip. The algorithms I use for control are various and the mode switch allows you to try out different options. The most useful one is the PD controller where you make the robot symetrical with sensors at the front and sides in pairs. You then work out the difference ebtween each sensor in the pair, work out the rate of change of the difference, add the results together and subtract from one motor and add to the other. This gives you a damped wall avoiding behaviour which works nicely.
I haven’t done what the wall racers do yet and given them an explicit mode for following a left or right hand wall, Mine just avoid walls, I think I got half way through writing some code for wall following and got distracted by other things.
more details I’ll try and post some more details soon, I also want to try and organise a proper robot racing competition (by specifying some rules - a bit like the robot football leagues). At the moment I’m busy trying to finish a PhD
Robot-race could be really fun! (Specially since mine can do overtakings)
Only thing is that it is extremely incompatible with the crap low framerate video on the net has. Even HD/100 Hz can have a hard time with it, as not only is speed high - the things are small, so you have to be close to film anything but "little things on the floor" - and this is really not very compatible with the way film / video works in general
Frits you should try to sell Frits you should try to sell this design to a toy company! I would have loved these as a kid. I can just imagine the commercial: “Corner drifting action!” “ULTRASONIC technology!” “You’re friends will think you’re so awesome!”
If you knew how many told me this, also for the YDM And if only the toy companies knew what I could make for hemm
Unfortunatly having the good ideas are not enough to penetrate to them, I tried a lot some time ago, but no answers or sandard rejections is all. Have tried third parties, dralers etc etc. Aparently it is not a market very hungry for all my bright ideas… or something else is wrong
Im working on making my nitro gas poered buggy autonomous. It goes 50 mph and im definately going to put a remote overide on it. I may put it up on here!
i was thinking about how close you could get them to the wall,have you tryed putting proportoinal responce into the code, something like 