The rain got in the way of our live demonstration, but this week we found sometime to run the golf cart and capture this video:
http://www.youtube.com/user/CSatSIUE
The cart successfully navigated from the Engineering Building to the University Center without running over anyone :shifty:
Wow, impressive. :wavetowel:
nice, what is used as guidance? Lasers, cameras?
Awesome! Did anyone else notice the guy walking in front of it? Did he take off running away from it? lol.
Quote from: bandyguy on 2008-06-28T22:32:28-05:00 (Saturday)
nice, what is used as guidance? Lasers, cameras?
Navigation is primarily done with a color webcam using Open CV. Ross Mead did a great job of using a set of filters that finds the campus path in a frame and then steers toward the bottom one third of the center of the path. This is done numerous times per second (I don't recall the exact frames per second).
One of the really cool features Ross put in is to sample a some pixels immediately in front of the cart to set color of the pathway. This makes the cart adaptable as it goes from black top to concrete or any other color surface.
is there any plans to give it depth perception? possibly by adding another webcam and calculating distance via position shift?
any form of GPS guidance?
Quote from: bandyguy on 2008-06-29T11:49:21-05:00 (Sunday)
is there any plans to give it depth perception? possibly by adding another webcam and calculating distance via position shift?
Stereovision is a possibility. One of the things we have been lucky enough to recently acquire is an outdoor laser. So we are considering mounting it on the front. If we add a pan/tilt mount we can combine the camera image with the laser data to get depth perception.
Quote from: raptor on 2008-06-30T10:56:39-05:00 (Monday)
any form of GPS guidance?
GPS is used for a few different things. GPS is used to determine when a goal point has been reached. It is also used to identify points of interest to give information about them (like the statues).
In the competition there is one goal point that requires the cart go off road. So GPS is used to steer toward that point.
Quote from: Tony on 2008-06-29T01:24:37-05:00 (Sunday)
Awesome! Did anyone else notice the guy walking in front of it? Did he take off running away from it? lol.
The guy running is Justin Ratcliffe. He was trying to keep the large crowd coming out of the MUC from interfering with the cart's run, so he ran ahead yelling "watchout for the run away robot!" :lol:
In regards to driving off road, what sort of terrain do you have to cover?
Quote from: raptor on 2008-07-01T09:34:08-05:00 (Tuesday)
In regards to driving off road, what sort of terrain do you have to cover?
Primarily grassy areas with possible obstacles such as trees and bushes.
So its not necessarily terrain that has drastic changes in elevation, more like an obstacle course without a paved path?
Quote from: raptor on 2008-07-01T10:01:41-05:00 (Tuesday)
So its not necessarily terrain that has drastic changes in elevation, more like an obstacle course without a paved path?
The competition was held in Pennsylvania which is rather hilly. One of the competition rules was that the vehicle could not exceed 5 mph. While most entries were toy cars or small robots, the weight of the golf cart on even mild grades is a problem.
The team implemented velocity control, but it was a last minute addition when they encountered a hill with about a 15% grade. It works but still has some bugs that need to be worked out.