Whisk's video

[Somchaya]

Hey everyone!

I've finally gotten around to editing all the videos of Whisk and put together a composite one highlighting the whole process..

[youtube=425,350]QlZHCbSTRbg[/youtube]

I think the words in the video are kind of unclear, so I might have to make it bigger, but we'll see.. enjoy!

Next step: get around to cleaning up the code and writing a nice tutorial-ish page.

Comments?

[hazzer123]

Hey thats really great

You can see the progress very clearly.

How did you get the robot to decide which path to take when it had two?

[Somchaya]

I had a timer that would tell Whisk when to slow down and speed up for the slopes, and also to tell when it reached the decision gate areas.

At the decision gate areas, the video image would be analyzed (well only the top bits cos of sunlight/shadows), and if two white areas are detected for a number of consecutive frames (with some other criteria) a split is declared, and it decides to follow the left or the right one (hard-coded). Once it makes a decision to split, another timer runs that prevents Whisk from detecting splits for around 3 seconds. This was done so that we wouldn't detect multiple splits from a single one.

[hazzer123]

So you knew the course beforehand?
And therefore told it to, for example, take a left at the first decision, a right at the second decision, etc.

[Brandon121233]

thats cheating- and most likely you would get caught

[Somchaya]

Oh, they release the course path to us 48h before the competition, and it's expected that we hard code the decisions.. so yeah, the code says something like "turn left at the first split," "turn right at the second split" and so on.

[Somchaya]

Update: I just sold Whisk off!

As a result, I don't think it'll be nice of me to post the code online.. sorry Admin!!

However, I will probably write a nice page that describes the Whisk process, how it works and stuff like that.. Just no explicit code

[hazzer123]

You sold whisk?
haha cool

how much did you get?

[Somchaya]

Haha, a little less than what I spent building Whisk, but with the prize money from the Mobot competition, overall I made a little bit, and lots of experience and fun

[sotu]

You should have sold it for more then u made it for! Its like a kit with a lot of parts to make a robot. Thats far cheaper then buying the robot pre-made!