In between aircraft I built this rover. It is a Traxxas Slash frame with a piece of 1/8" aircraft plywood on top for an electronics platform. The plywood measures 16.5" x 6.5". It was super easy to build. In the next few days I will finish configuring the electronics, update and confirgure the software and test it out. If anybody has any related tips or experiences they would like to share I would be happy to hear them. I will post updates when I have it running.
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@Steven Boyd, I switched my APM1 to the new 2650 board and added the magnetometer so now I am planning to test out my rover this weekend. I will use the code by Jean-Louis Naudin, have you seen it? If you click on "ArduRover" at the top of the main page it will take you to the thread he started. He is good and incredibly fast. What code are you using?
I am also thinking about an extendible camera arm. I have a Homeseer home control system and on occasion get an alarm message from it while not at home. It would be nice to have an internet accessible, indoor capable, long armed rover, to check things out.
Of course right now it is too much fun bashing around outside.
Would you get more accurate rollover detection on something like a crawler w/ accelerometers on each axle as well? How much information is too much, or not useful, in situations like this?
@robert that should be easier, thermopile or even ldr on the bottom of rover should do ..
@Stephen, I think you should look into employing the accelerometer as a tip-over prevention/detection system. ;)
looks cool, post some video as well, looks like ardurover is taking up steam, hope there is enough CS373 fans in here to take ardurover to the next level, add an extra board ( possibly ARM) to run the code...
@duc looks like u have gone quite a way ;) btw is ur project ( rest of it) open sourced, if so would be curious to have a peek at the code
@Adam: Hehe. Citrus spray at least removes the poo smell after cleaning so you can take the rover indoors again. :) Haven't bothered with posting more videos. I figured hours of a rover slowly crawling around my neighborhood exploring would hardly be interesting for anyone but me..
@Duc Phuc Tran, Very cool. I think you are ahead of all of us. Are you saying that you are going to fire missles at your rover??? I look forward to hearing more about your project when you have time.
@John Arne Birkeland, you are so right about just having fun with this stuff, I had a blast driving the rover around outside while I sat in the living room watching the world go by on my TV. I had about a 200' range on both the video link and the stock traxxas radio, that was with walls and trees in the way.
John: Yes, I think it probably would make sense to bring make the ArduRover code a branch of the current ArduPlane code. As it is, the ArduRover is based on a different architecture (the experimental ArduPilotOne), which makes it hard to maintain.
My sense is that rovers, while superficially similar to the 2D side of aircraft navigation, are actually quite a bit different. Although they don't need stabilization code, they need much better dead reckoning code to compensate for the fine-grained issues with GPS data. You need lots of smoothing, extrapolation and possibly more sensors, such as wheel encoders or optical flow sensors, to measure precise motion.
It would be a fun exercise, however, and I'd be happy to work with any team that wants to try this port.
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