Let's start an official ArduRover project

Inspired by John Arne's post, I got a Redcat Rockslide, which is totally cool and a great robotics platform. As you can see, it's really easy to add a mounting platform for electronics (that's APM with GPS and Xbee mounted above) and there's LOADS of room. You could even have it carry a laptop if you wanted. BTW, that's the 1/8 size Redcat shown above, which is $236. I think the 1/10 size Redcat would probably be just as good for most uses, and it's just $159. [Update: the 1:10 isn't big enough. See this comparison]

I've registered the ArduRover name, and am now just looking for the best starting point to modify the APM code for ground rovers. Since James Goppert is part of the APM dev team, we'll probably start with his rover code, which you can see at work here. But if others have code or sensor additions to the basic APM set that would be good to add to a rover, this is the place to discuss and share.

Ideally, we'll get this done in time for the Sparkfun AVC contest, on the hope that APM can have a decent chance of placing in all of the categories--ground, plane and quad. Which would be awesome.

One thing

I'd like to mention is that you can have a lot of fun with muuuch cheaper vehicles than the ones that have been discussed so far in this thread. The summer interns who configured and programmed that Summit in the video started out with a $12.99 truck I bought at Toys R Us.

They had to make the cheap truck accomplish a GPS-related task before they could "graduate" to the more expensive Summit. It turned out to be a little too small and too cheap, once we got some experience with it. $35 would probably be a better starting point. By the time we took the yellow body off and taped a 900mAh lipo, Arduino, Adafruit motor shield, GPS, and XBee on it, the tiny truck did not go very fast at all. There were no bearings on the axles, so they just rub on the plastic where they snap in. It had left and right steering (cheaper trucks only steer in one direction) but it was not proportional steering. It was either max left, max right, or straight.

On the other hand, the 1/5th scale HPI Baja 5B is about $900 and would be a tempting choice for the Sparkfun Challenge. I have three at work. They weigh about 20 lbs, though, so if you drive one into your leg or a parked car at 40 mph, you can do some damage. Maybe after everyone gets the Kinect figured out, we'll be able to have a Sparkfun contest that looks more like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cGqFOHico0

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

Join diydrones

Comments

Garry Qualls February 4, 2011 at 1:56am

One thing

I'd like to mention is that you can have a lot of fun with muuuch cheaper vehicles than the ones that have been discussed so far in this thread. The summer interns who configured and programmed that Summit in the video started out with a $12.99 truck I bought at Toys R Us.

They had to make the cheap truck accomplish a GPS-related task before they could "graduate" to the more expensive Summit. It turned out to be a little too small and too cheap, once we got some experience with it. $35 would probably be a better starting point. By the time we took the yellow body off and taped a 900mAh lipo, Arduino, Adafruit motor shield, GPS, and XBee on it, the tiny truck did not go very fast at all. There were no bearings on the axles, so they just rub on the plastic where they snap in. It had left and right steering (cheaper trucks only steer in one direction) but it was not proportional steering. It was either max left, max right, or straight.

On the other hand, the 1/5th scale HPI Baja 5B is about $900 and would be a tempting choice for the Sparkfun Challenge. I have three at work. They weigh about 20 lbs, though, so if you drive one into your leg or a parked car at 40 mph, you can do some damage. Maybe after everyone gets the Kinect figured out, we'll be able to have a Sparkfun contest that looks more like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cGqFOHico0
Garry Qualls February 4, 2011 at 1:49am

Someone asked what hardware was on that Traxxas Summit in the video on page 9 of this thread. It had an Ardupilot 1.0, a regular Arduino Duemilanove, an Acroname RxMux, a Sparkfun Logomatic data logger, and an EM-406a GPS. At one time, I think there was an XBee and a Sparkfun HMC5843 3-axis magnetometer breakout board on it, too. If you remove the plastic body panel part of the Summit, you have a nice plastic exoskeleton/roll cage that makes it easy to mount things. It has a turn diameter of about 10 ft, so it was hard to use indoors in a 20' square Vicon area. The 1/8th scale Redcat Rockslides are more agile, much less complex mechanically, and easily climb up and down most stairs.
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson February 3, 2011 at 9:42pm

To all on this thread: I've set up a Google Code repository for the ArduRover project. If you want to start submitting code, please PM me with your Google-linked email address and I'll add you to the repository.

http://code.google.com/p/ardurover/
Stefan Barlow February 3, 2011 at 8:30pm

Wow that's a huge difference. Thanks for posting that.
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson February 3, 2011 at 8:14pm

I also ordered the cheaper 1:10 Rockslider to see if it was big enough. It isn't, I think, especially if you want to add other sensors and processor boards. Here's the 1:8 and 1:10 side-by-side, with the APM on my DIY electronics platform for scale (I'm sending the 1:10 back):
Stefan Barlow February 3, 2011 at 9:52am

Well count me among the Rockslide 1:8 crawlers, I ordered from Amazon last night.

While my town is flat my kids are young so slow is probably better now as they'll want to drive it too.

Also I'm hoping that long wheelbase will be able to tackle my stairs inside the house so I can send it downstairs on autonomous errands :)
Brad Smith February 3, 2011 at 8:36am

something like this
Brad Smith February 3, 2011 at 8:34am

awesome john ,,,maybe you could tilt the motor 45 degrees on the arm and put a cone shaped wheel on the other end of the motor shaft then could walk and or drive
T3

healthyfatboy February 3, 2011 at 5:05am

Looks pretty good for a start there. It sounded like it was running in low gear as it has more of a whine in that gear. What hardware did you use on it? I assume it's the basic ArduPilot but what kind of GPS, did you use a magnetometer, anything else? A few more details would be nice.
Garry Qualls February 3, 2011 at 4:38am

Here is a Traxxis Summit using an Ardupilot and integrated with FlightGear for hardware-in-the-loop simulation. I can't remember whether we were running it in high gear or low gear when it was driving outside:

of 8

This reply was deleted.