The making of Ant Intelligent Robot

[ndan]

Hello,


As part of my research project I'm designing a small differential drive robot platform (10x10 cm) with many cool features like:
- speed&position compensated control
- video camera (VGA)
- audio recognition system
- 2 x range sensors (ultrasonic), 8 x proximity sensors (IR)
- real-time odometry feedback (every 10 ms)
- Ethernet Wi-fi, USB
- Programming in languages like: C/C++, Java, Python, Ruby... can be programmed even in bash
- Integrated development environment with real-time debugging over a Wi-fi connection based on eclipse
and much more...


So I thought it would be cool to make a video for the making of this platform... without further ado here is the video. Enjoy 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZspMbp2PyE

Feel free to post any questions you have.

Chears,
Dan.

[bdeuell]

Looks like a nice little robot. Great craftsmanship too.

Having the axis of the motors not aligned seems interesting to me. Obviously it allows for the compact envelope but I think it would add a lot of complexity to your dynamics. Did you implement any special controller to account for this? Have you seen any challenges in the accuracy when turning the robot?

[ndan]

Hi,

Yes, the robot has an odometry compensated controller which is updated every millisecond. The odometry in turn is computed for the COG (center of gravity) of the robot taking into account the geometric axis of each motor. I've also implemented functions to get the odmetry (x,y,teta) for any point on the robot edges (including sensor offsets).

I'll post a link to paper when it is published for the actual algorithm.

Also I forgot to mention that all this is not done on the main processor... it is a distributed architecture assuring fault tolerance:
- the motor board has its own controller and does all the computing for controlling the motors and odometry (here is the compensated control algorithm implemented ):
- sensor board has its own controller and does all the measuring and filtering for range and proximity sensors
- camera also... images are presented in jpeg format to the main board
- audio recognition module too ... sends acknowledgements to a previously user trained sound if it "hears" it.
- main board - ganders all data form the modules and it is where the user writes his programs

hope I have answered your question,
Dan.




 

[ndan]

Also, the compensation refers to a Bayesian  model (probabilistic model) that is integrated within the control loop to improve the accuracy of the odometry (x,y,teta). This in turn gives no measurable impact for the robot turning.

Oh yes, the odometry is computed every 1 ms but communicated to the the main board every 10 ms, not to confuse this with the first post.

[mklrobo]

 
Great robot to begin building the "army ant" network.