Rovers

It sounds like you might be trying to do what robotic vacuum cleaners do on carpet, but for ice.

At a minimum you need a way to control the two wheels independently -- it's common to have a motor/gearbox/encoder assembly for each wheel. That lets you sense and control rotation angle and rotation velocity of the wheel. This would allow you to "dead reckon" a path across the ice, where the robot would blindly execute a set of drives and turns. Dead reckoning probably won't be good enough, because it relies on a very accurate starting position and heading, and the wheels are bound to slip inconsistently relative to the ice.

So, you need some kind of feedback on the motion. The easiest would be to physically draw the path on the ice, and have a simple line-following robot, but that's probably not an option. You could put an IMU+compass on it, and maybe do a good enough job dead-reckoning it to make it work. Another idea is an optical flow sensor close to the ice (basically a computer mouse for ice), no idea how well that would work. You could do a vision system to get the job done, but that would be difficult and expensive.

If you draw out a picture of what you want the patterns to look like, or show a video of a human doing the job that you want to automate, we might get a better idea of the problem and possible solutions.

P.S. You posted in the wrong forum. :-P

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Tommy May 12, 2014 at 5:05pm

I agree with Mr Leichty(If modifying the "terrain" is possible), in fact if you could use the ceiling it could be as simple as a line follower.

I also would think to find this topic in Ground Vehicles.

Tommy(First time poster)
John Leichty October 2, 2011 at 12:18pm

It sounds like you might be trying to do what robotic vacuum cleaners do on carpet, but for ice.

At a minimum you need a way to control the two wheels independently -- it's common to have a motor/gearbox/encoder assembly for each wheel. That lets you sense and control rotation angle and rotation velocity of the wheel. This would allow you to "dead reckon" a path across the ice, where the robot would blindly execute a set of drives and turns. Dead reckoning probably won't be good enough, because it relies on a very accurate starting position and heading, and the wheels are bound to slip inconsistently relative to the ice.

So, you need some kind of feedback on the motion. The easiest would be to physically draw the path on the ice, and have a simple line-following robot, but that's probably not an option. You could put an IMU+compass on it, and maybe do a good enough job dead-reckoning it to make it work. Another idea is an optical flow sensor close to the ice (basically a computer mouse for ice), no idea how well that would work. You could do a vision system to get the job done, but that would be difficult and expensive.

If you draw out a picture of what you want the patterns to look like, or show a video of a human doing the job that you want to automate, we might get a better idea of the problem and possible solutions.

P.S. You posted in the wrong forum. :-P

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