This project is in the building phase for over an year because it is in a permanent change and it`s inspired from military models. Mechanically speaking it`s not the ideal model because it is taller, heavier and it cannot climb big angle hills because the position of the batteries is the main problem. I have used hobby components, chinese connectors and other electrical parts, 30 years old used Sony and military russian components. The video camera is a dual Arecont CCD day/night, 3MPix/1.3MPix made in USA. Unfortunately it send over MJPEG compression and it uses 5-6 Mbps at 1fps/3Mpix. I have spent a few months to build and optimize the DC/DC convertors. Other 2 projects showed me that the DC/DC convertors have a crucial role in the power usage.
For the moment the robot only collects data and makes no processing. In the future we will change the platform to Linux because it is made on WinXP and we will implement an automatic navigation function, but the maths are killing us.
I have used a chassis with 1/75 gears, but the quality of the execution is not very good, anyway it is suitable for our purpose.The GVWR has approximately 6kg, only the LIFePo 4pcs x 3.2Vx 12Ah have 1.3kg.
Initially i used the controller and the mos-fet drivers of this chassis but at 4KHZ it was on fire. After some tests i have purchased some 15A drivers from Spakfun, 30A sensors and an Arduino Uno on which i have implemented Correct-Phase PWM. It is working perfectly, no overheating. The communication between the logical blocks it`s done on I2C.
The software is done on WinXP programmed in C# and the Arduino IDE. The robot is controlled by a webpage, it is working on every device which has on it JavaScript. On the robot an web-server is working and another software which handles the socket connections between the client and the main computer.I have spent some good hundred hours to get the software up and running. It was very hard to correct the errors. Expect some minor bugs which will be solved very soon everything is working flawlessly. Today I have tested it in the filed and I am pleased by the results.
Wow, cool. Is this a computer case? Impressive and clean looking. You wrote it’s controlled via a website…why not give us a link so we can drive your robot around
The robot generates its own wi-fi network so it is a bit hard for me to route all the packeges between the internet and the robot. After i implement all the software on Linux, i think ill choose LUbuntu a stripped version of ubuntu made specially for the RoBoard, i will put it on the internet for full access. The webpage controll method is not a good one because it uses a lot of resources, i want to make applications for several platform like windows, mac, android and ios to controll the robot. Anyway the project is really intersting and it got my full attention.
I still think that you should program it to bring a beer from a shop down the street… To me that is like the turing test for the usefullness of a robot. Note that Ro-Bot-X has posted a challenge, offering a reward for whoever trains his robot to fetch a beer. Ma bucur ca ati descoperit LMR! Welcome and Good luck!
Very nice build … and a ton of components. Keep up the good work. I am building cr4 for a year now and even if it is simpler I still have a lot of work to do.
This looks good… I’m working on a robot that also features the roboard (in my case the 110), and I too have been playing with the idea of using a webserver. Not sure yet though, still working on the basics (interfacing with hardware). Control will be done from an Xbox controller, joystick messages will be sent to the robot over the network using UDP. I’m using Linux, VectorLinux at the moment (because I’m used to it) but I’ll probably switch to something different (lighter) later.
An old Nikko r/c car, a webcam, and some other sensors. I’m still experimenting though, the sensors I have now may not be the ones I will use on the ‘final’ robot. More info can be found here: https://sites.google.com/site/theheadacher/robot
When the bot starts to become a little more complete I’ll probably add it here as a project, but for now I’m not making a lot of progress yet. I’m a little scared about the electronics, my main concern is frying the roboard. It’s too expensive to burn. So for now I’ve been doing programming; I got the code to capture an image from a webcam working, and the code to send joystick data over UDP, receiving joystick data over UDP is almost functional too. Everything is programmed in C/C++ for now, using object oriented programming.
The final goal is to make it autonomous, but for me the first milestone will be just driving it with the xbox controller.
It is so big, so expensive, so difficult, respect! But I think in this class(PC Operating system) of robots the FPV function is the “standart” function. It must do something that arduino based robots can`t do. You know, face recognized system or video orientation and naviagation system, you know some cool stuff.
if you have any problems in viewing it just say and i`ll email you a link with the video.