http://www.vexrobotics.com/wiki/Skyrise
Your robot gets an "autonomous" period where it is to take your colored cubes and drop them on the posts. Afterwards, you get a remote control time period to finish the job. Pretty cool!
Each team is creating something different, 2 teams have a traditional drive system (two powered wheels in the back, two omniwheels in the front) while the third team is using 4 drive wheels, all omni, giving them the ability to move sideways!
As far as picking up those squares in the arena, two teams are using something like a fork on the end of a lever while the third team is using this telescoping lifting device that goes straight up an down.
They use the vex robotic systems. I've never seen this setup before, it looks like a nice package to allow the students to focus on the mechanical aspects of their robots more than the electronic part. It is a jumpstart on the whole process. Basic motors, gears, sprockets, metal parts that can be bolted together in any number of ways to solve the mission: Get those cubes stacked on the posts!
I'm there to help, but to be perfectly honest, I'm not helping much, I'm probably more in the way at the moment than helpful. These students are pretty adept at building their robots, and the electrical components, well, VEX takes care of that.... so.... Hopefully I can be more helpful when it comes to the programming, something I'm good at!
So I'm looking to be of some use. I know that when the competition rolls around, I'll be able to jump in and help out, but to avoid feeling totally helpless at this point, I jumped on an idea they started to work on last year, the "creeper bot".
Creeper Bot: wander around looking for someone to focus on, once locked on.... follow them around!
So much can be done with this.... :) This looks like a perfect way for me to get into robotics, put my electrical engineering degree and software experience to work, make something cool and hopefully be able to introduce the group to more of an electronics spin to the robotics world (the mechanical stuff is cool and a good first step, but without the electronics behind it....nothing moves!)
But first, how to lock on to a person? This is what I thought was the hardest part! This requires video analysis, not something a simple beaglebone, raspberry pi, udoo and especially an arduino is capable of doing, or doing very well. After many hours of research, I ran across this REALLY COOL product (which I subsequently purchased on Amazon.com!) Last year when they were working on the creeper bot, this product didn't exist! It just hit Amazon shelves in March of 2014! Perfect timing.
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| http://charmedlabs.com/default/?p=384 |
This little jewel started out as a Kickstarter (follow that link, you won't be sorry). Kickstarter is a website where inventors can put out an idea, say how much it will cost to create, then ask for crowd sourced funding. These folks asked for a crowd sourcing of $25,000 and got $274,352! The project was funded in September of 2013 and is now for sale on Amazon (link above).
Anyway, this is the perfect solution for the clubs "creeper bot" project. You can train it to look for a color or a pattern of colors. I can see you being able to train it to look for yellow on blue (yellow shirt and blue jeans), have it hunt around until it finds someone wearing a yellow shirt and blue jeans, then lock on!
Now the project has a chance! This is the heart, add to it an Arduino, a mobile platform, some electronics to manage power, noise, and a battery, sensors so we don't run into walls... now we have something!
There are a couple of examples of using the PIXY already out there, here and here.
Whats different with the creeper bot? Everyone else is tracking little toys or balls, we are going to try and track a person! I think we can do it based on everything I've seen so far.
I figure if I build it then donate it to the club with all the basics working.... The students can learn some electronics, some c++ programming all on a platform that would be fun to learn on. Plus, they can then come along later and add things like:
- Sound (when focused on someone...when it backs up it goes beep beep beep)
- Lighting (I can see LED's that are yellow when searching, red when LOCKED ON!)
- Spot Light, what better way to tell someone they are special! :)
- Obstacle Avoidance (no new parts, just fancy programming)
- Remote Control with your Android phone: I would like this thing to be "driven" by an operator into an area, then turned over to the autonomous programming to find our person of interest. We could "drive" it from our android phones using bluetooth.
- the possibilities are endless!
Next post: Rounding up the parts.... parts is parts.....
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