What Next Robot?
Guess I missed telling you about a decision on the robot project.
We'd been doing mostly motor control and related sensing and got the robot to move a fixed distance and turn (albeit with less accuracy than in a straight line).
Rather than make the position control really, really good, I thought we should work on something we don't know whether will work at all; the camera.
Most of the maze solving robots use simple infra-red sensors either along the tops of walls or, more likely, pointed the side walls (which is better for angular momentum reasons) with, sometimes, some not so simple processing. I fancied using a camera. Cameras have been talked about a lot but in reality machine vision is not an overly simple problem for individuals, especially spare-time hobbyists, to tackle - but not impossible. For us an additional problem is that adding infra-red sensors as well as the camera would require input/output expansion on our current microcontroller and extra mechanical work that I'm not overly keen to do.
There are several really big unknowns with the camera solution:
Doing this now rather than later will allow us to know if the current philosophy behind the robot is possible and if we require hardware adjustments or extra sensors to compensate for what we can't do with the camera. We are effectively bringing the risk earlier in the project to allow us more time to compensate if the camera does not work in some way.
At some point I'll detail what the theory behind the camera position sensing is.
We'd been doing mostly motor control and related sensing and got the robot to move a fixed distance and turn (albeit with less accuracy than in a straight line).
Rather than make the position control really, really good, I thought we should work on something we don't know whether will work at all; the camera.
Most of the maze solving robots use simple infra-red sensors either along the tops of walls or, more likely, pointed the side walls (which is better for angular momentum reasons) with, sometimes, some not so simple processing. I fancied using a camera. Cameras have been talked about a lot but in reality machine vision is not an overly simple problem for individuals, especially spare-time hobbyists, to tackle - but not impossible. For us an additional problem is that adding infra-red sensors as well as the camera would require input/output expansion on our current microcontroller and extra mechanical work that I'm not overly keen to do.
There are several really big unknowns with the camera solution:
- Can we communicate with the camera? (both the serial and parallel interface)
- Can we perform the algorithm to know where we are when stationary? (the camera is probably useless without this ability)
- Can we get a picture to know where we are when moving? (might need IR sensors that we don't currently have if we can't do this)
- Is the angle of view good enough? (might well need a wide-angle lens as it stands)
Doing this now rather than later will allow us to know if the current philosophy behind the robot is possible and if we require hardware adjustments or extra sensors to compensate for what we can't do with the camera. We are effectively bringing the risk earlier in the project to allow us more time to compensate if the camera does not work in some way.
At some point I'll detail what the theory behind the camera position sensing is.
posted by RobZed at 8:27 pm
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