I'm very excited to announce that I've been published by Robot Magazine! :) My article describes the ups and downs of my two year experience building Data Bus, my 25mph race rover, for the 2011 and 2012 Sparkfun AVC (Autonomous Vehicle Competition).
The article appears in the Mar-Apr issue (#39) and sheds light on some of the problems I ran int as well as solutions that worked, and describes some of the adventure -- the thrill of success and crushing blows of failure :)
Comments
Hi Bot,
i was doing pretty simple things derived from basic examples (minds-i and others) for the start.
used 3 mid-range sharp IR sensors (50-150cm range) in the video and it worked in sunlight and moderate speeds.
i also have found the sonar seems to be not suited to be pointed in moving direction.
for my next steps i have choosen the longer range model of the sharp collection.
http://www.sharpsma.com/webfm_send/1490
will see how well that will work :)
Nice! What are you doing for obstacle avoidance?
I did some experimentation last year with Sharp IR rangers, the 5m type, and a Maxbotics sonar sensor. The former was mounted vertically and simply didn't work. I didn't get a chance to try them mounted horizontally.
The sonar only seemed to work at lower speeds. There's myriad possibilities for this. Vibration of the body/chassis interfering with the signal, doppler effect pushing the return signal outside the sensor's tuned range, etc. Didn't have time to track down the root cause on that either.
I suppose I better get crackin' on those issues, huh? :)
thanks bot,
always very informative stuff in your well done videos!
i got my buggy up to ca. 17 mph but that was pretty much the max speed it could run with that setup.
i have found obstacle avoidance is working way better with slow speeds here.
so to get the vehicles fast and safe is a fun goal i think :)
Regards,
Linus
@linus -- cool! Looks really good! I also happen to love those buggies. How fast do you think it was going? I have some video of mine on its final run, here:
@Joshua -- LOL!!! No doubt!!
Bot,
Maybe this year you will consider some additional equipment for your kit?
Hi,
love it to see my rover running very fast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdDIhrHSmzk
actually i had it running faster as i should probably :)
I will not be at the AVC but I wish you lots of fun!
thanks for sharing, always enjoying to read about your Bus.
Regards,
Linus
@TJCIII - thanks! 30mph? Cool!! I've been reading your posts a bout the E-Maxx. Sounds like ArduRover is coming along. It should be a great competition this year!
I've started working on a few minor things for Data Bus like speed/handling, converting my Sharp IR sensor to I2C with a custom backpack board, converting my LCD display to I2C, tweaking the baseboard design to consolidate boards and prep for professional fab, refining some aspects of the wheel encoder hardware.
I'm hoping to get wireless telemetry/control in place soon (XBee for now) but have to free up a serial port. I also want to get an FPV camera in place because chasing the robot in my car starts to get impractical at these speeds...
I've been putting off the hard stuff which includes obstacle detection (a suite of sensors, custom camera, etc), tracking down position estimation errors, and porting to STM32F3/F4. The latter I may not bother with. The current solution works fine and isn't really lacking for performance. An interim step may be to build another base board with an LPC1768 and set aside the mbed. I'm moving to offline compile anyway. Maybe I can work some kind of wireless bootloader compile thingy too.
Speaking of AVC, I'd like to invite you and anyone else that's interested) to the diyrovers Google Group which has several prospective AVC competitors on it. There have been some interesting discussions even with the small membership. We tend towards focused technical chats. I don't think anyone else on the list is running an ArduPilot-based solution so it'd be interesting to get that perspective.
@Bot,
I read your article in Robot Mag and found it very informative and well written. I am presently preparing a Traxxas E-Maxx for that competition and anticipate at least 30mph in the straightaways and speed reduction in the corners once Tridge gets the ArduRover2 code up to snuff. Preliminary test have been very encouraging.
Regards,
TCIII
!