RoboNurse 2.0

Hello, my name is Carlos Orozco, and I am a High School student. My partner and I competed at the Greater San Diego Science Fair this March obtaining a 3rd place, we developed a robot that can assist senior citizens and/or medicine users in a way that the administration of their medicine can be controlled by an autonomous robot.

To build this robot we used an Arduino UNO. We connected a GPS Shield on top of the Arduino UNO an then we connected it to a Rover 5 Motor Driver. We used 4 gear motors and we connected them to the Rover 5 Motor Driver. Then we connected the Rover 5 Motor Driver to the GPS Shield and then we programmed a course that the robot is supposed to follow to deliver the medicine.

We had a lot of trouble with the programming part, if somebody would be willing to help us it would be amazing. The basic goal is to create a GPS coordinates
path to deliver medicine to the user. Some example codes will be above of this blog.

This is the total list of parts we used:

Chassis

Wheels

Arduino UNO

GPS

Rover 5 Motor Driver

4 GearMotors

12v Battery (For the gearmotors)

9v Battery (For the Arduino UNO)

*If anyone wants the schematics of diagrams just message me.

*Demo Code for the RoboNurse2.0

*The first RoboNurse: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/robonurse

democoderobonurse.ino

Hi Carlos, a really interesting project.

Just a thought, if this is supposed to be used indoors, GPS is likely to be very problematic.

Even if it aquires a few satellites, the HDOP (error) is usually very high and position accuracy suffers greatly if it is useable at all.

And indoors, especially "multipath" can actually skew the GPS position considerably.

Of course, indoors you actually need higher accuracy not worse.

I would strongly recommend that you consider another or supplementary path following means.

The simplest of these is a ground based line or wire following system.

For anything more sophisticated you would probably need to go to a camera or laser scanner.

Although cameras are cheap enough the software to make use of them is daunting to say the least.

And, although a laser scanner might be comparatively easier to use, they cost a ton unless you want to get one of the scanners from a Neato vacuum cleaner and try to use it, a significant but not impossible project.

Here is one of our most brilliant users Jack Crossfires Blog about this option for a tiny quadcopter:

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/xv-11-lidar-copter?xg_source=ac...

If your only using it outdoors and well clear of tall objects (buildings and trees) GPS might work adequately.

Sorry to be negative, but although the absolute position information of GPS is very attractive it is also quite limited in a lot of real world applications.

Hospitals and Offices that use simple delivery robots generally have a optical tape on the wall or a magnetic wire embedded under the carpet.

Most other solutions use things like active or passive optical markers and only just now is environment relative navigation beginning to be feasible using laser scanners and time of flight cameras (and lots of money).

The Xbox's Kinect uses a Prime Sense structured light detector to produce a 3D point cloud and is probably the cheapest way to get this kind of information.

The Xtion pro from Asus also uses the same sensor as the Kinect and is only $80.00:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826785047

When the new Windows V2 Kinect is released in a few months it will be the first affordable time of flight camera.

All of these solutions will still require lots of programming and computer resources but they are the best affordable approach at this time.

Best of Luck,

Gary

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Comments

Carlos Orozco March 29, 2014 at 10:13pm

Thanks Gary and Crady for commenting. Gary, I was thinking about using the kinect as you suggested me in my first post; but for my lack of experience and the voltage that this would need I decided not to use it. That is why I used the GPS, but as you can see it wasn´t a very good idea. I look forward to this project and hopefully it will be better next year for the next science fair. Thank you.
Crady von Pawlak March 29, 2014 at 9:16pm

Congrats on an awesome bot! Gary is right, GPS is pretty much worthless for indoor navigation, with either a guide wire or optical cues on the floor being the most common methods for industrial robot navigation. That said, you may also want to consider RFIDs. Theoretically your nav system could use them as breadcrumbs.
Gary McCray March 29, 2014 at 8:48pm

Hi Carlos, a really interesting project.

Just a thought, if this is supposed to be used indoors, GPS is likely to be very problematic.

Even if it aquires a few satellites, the HDOP (error) is usually very high and position accuracy suffers greatly if it is useable at all.

And indoors, especially "multipath" can actually skew the GPS position considerably.

Of course, indoors you actually need higher accuracy not worse.

I would strongly recommend that you consider another or supplementary path following means.

The simplest of these is a ground based line or wire following system.

For anything more sophisticated you would probably need to go to a camera or laser scanner.

Although cameras are cheap enough the software to make use of them is daunting to say the least.

And, although a laser scanner might be comparatively easier to use, they cost a ton unless you want to get one of the scanners from a Neato vacuum cleaner and try to use it, a significant but not impossible project.

Here is one of our most brilliant users Jack Crossfires Blog about this option for a tiny quadcopter:

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/xv-11-lidar-copter?xg_source=ac...

If your only using it outdoors and well clear of tall objects (buildings and trees) GPS might work adequately.

Sorry to be negative, but although the absolute position information of GPS is very attractive it is also quite limited in a lot of real world applications.

Hospitals and Offices that use simple delivery robots generally have a optical tape on the wall or a magnetic wire embedded under the carpet.

Most other solutions use things like active or passive optical markers and only just now is environment relative navigation beginning to be feasible using laser scanners and time of flight cameras (and lots of money).

The Xbox's Kinect uses a Prime Sense structured light detector to produce a 3D point cloud and is probably the cheapest way to get this kind of information.

The Xtion pro from Asus also uses the same sensor as the Kinect and is only $80.00:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826785047

When the new Windows V2 Kinect is released in a few months it will be the first affordable time of flight camera.

All of these solutions will still require lots of programming and computer resources but they are the best affordable approach at this time.

Best of Luck,

Gary

This reply was deleted.