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Whisk wins the Mobot Mini Challenge!

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Somchaya:
Hey! I just recently completed building the chassis of my robot Whisk. Whisk is designed to take part in the Mobot competition, so the design choices were made with that in mind.

Basically, I'm using two Hitec servos to power the differential drive, and I'm using an omni wheel as the caster wheel. My original prototype used a regular swivel wheel, but it didn't work out too well and would cause some issues when the robot tried to go straight.

Here's the picture of the current version of Whisk:

So, Whisk's chassis is just a base that carries the laptop armed with a webcam, with wheels to navigate the Mobot track. The wheels that I'm using are really big (6" in diameter) because the servos I originally used had around 60 rpm, so to get decent speed I needed big wheels.

This is an early picture of Whisk, with just the bottom base and servos attached:

Here's a picture with all the electronics put in:

And without further ado, here are the videos:
[youtube=425,350]jYjw8aNFUNU[/youtube]
This is the first version of Whisk, which basically worked, but had a couple of issues. It was really difficult to take out the laptop and make changes to the code, since the laptop was securely fastened on the inside of the chassis. Also, the servo mounts I was using weren't designed for the heavy weight I think, so the wheels would slowly splay outwards as time went by. Also, the software, heh heh, didn't work basically.. So the robot just didn't like to follow the line.

[youtube=425,350]abVYDMyxt5E[/youtube]
This is the present (second) version of Whisk. Essentially, I made the servo mounts a little more sturdy (I hope), and moved all the electronics below. This way, I can remove the laptop and make changes as I need to, without having to dismantle half the robot each time. Also, although it looks like Whisk is semi-intelligently navigating the decision points, there's actually no code right now that does that so it was kind of a fluke that it survived that area.

Yep, that's basically the state of Whisk right now. I'm still working on the software part. I think I've fixed the bug that caused it to fail twice on the second video, but I haven't tested it out. Right now, I'm thinking of running some learning algorithms on Whisk so that it can drive itself without explicit code. No idea if that'll work though!

What do you guys think of Whisk? Any suggestions/comments would be greatly appreciated!

Kohanbash:
Hi
Good Luck with Mobot. ill probably go and watch some of it.

Something that might help is if you access the laptop using ssh so you don't need to pull it off every time you want to change something or check its status.

Tsukubadaisei:
Good job!

I think the problem with the program not working is not your fault. Instead of using white for the lines try using a color that has more contrast with the floor, like red or black. Camera robots have problem with lightning specially in open areas like that place.

JesseWelling:
but that *IS* the challenge of mobot.

Tsukubadaisei:
I see... I did not know anything about this mobot competition.

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