Discussions

I'm new here and by way of introduction I'd like to provide a link to my FarmBoz project and hopefully get some input and feedback for its further developement.

Link for project - http://clikire.snappages.com/farmboz-3.htm

There is a video at the bottome of the page of the UGV in action and 2 other pages describing previous versions of the project.

The primary aim of the project is to be able to remotely observe livestock (mainly sheep) and also aid with the herding of livestock when they need to be rounded up. The farm is about 50 acres based in Ireland. The farm house is located in a corner of the farm so to get full coverage of the farm I need a range of about 1km. The farm is fairly flat but has undulating hills and some hedges. Currently the best range I can get is about 300 meters using a Spetrum DX5e RC or xBees for control and a similar range for video with a wireless transitter and receiver (these are achievable from inside the house with no external aerials). It also has a GPS module and compass for waypoint navigation. An Arduino is used as the brains of the robot and it controls 2 4QD speed controllers that employ differential/tank steer.

I spent a considerable amount of time on this project between 2009 and 2011 but it is currently on the back burner but I'd like to return to it again in the near future. The 2 main areas I'd like some input on are as follows:

1 - I got the GPS working reasonable but it is not 100%. If its going in a South to North direction it finds the waypoint and turns correctly but going North to South is has difficulty and often circles the waypoint a number of times before finding it. Mainly for this reason I'm considering swapping out the Arduino and using the ArduRover set up instead. My main concern is will I be able to tweak the ArduRover to do differential steering - Any input or comments on this would be much appreciated.

2 - How to extend the range of control and video to 1km+. The ultimate goal is to be able to control the robot over the web so I can observe the stock while I'm away from the farm. One option I'm considering is using 3G wireless broadband and an IP PTZ camera. I'm considering hacking the camera so that instead of it panning and tilting the camera it would it would control the forward/reverse and left/right of the robot. My biggest concern with this is that broadband coverage would be strong enough as the area is somewhat marginal for coverage. Is this a good approach to the range problem or would WiFi or some other approach be better?

Looking forward to hearing any comments or suggestions

One final thought - If you want to learn how everything works in a project like this then build everything from scratch yourself, but building things from modules that already work and are tried and proven is a much faster and simpler approach I think. For this project I took the former approach.