# More progress



## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

Been totally covered over working on this robot. Managed to get out to the vintage race at COTA awhile back. Tried to use a teleconverter for the first time. Not much luck. Hit or miss focus. But to be honest I didn't have time to microadjust it so if I'd done that I suspect the results would have been much better. Sure is nice to have that extra reach.

I replaced the two Nvidia Jetson TK1's with the just released TX1 which is a 64 bit 4 core machine with a 256 core GPU. Enough power to do AI now. Object detection and classification and all that. The actual computer is about the size of a pack of smokes. Fits onto a daughter board for development. The company I bought my motor controllers from is doing a robot specific daughter card for it. I'll switch over to that once its available. The TX1 is much better suited to robots. Can handle a 4S lipo straight without any additional transformers. 18v to 9v range. Has a charging monitor port which makes it much easier to interface solar panels. I'm in the process of moving to San Antonio so I was going to box up the bot today for the move. But since I hadn't had the camera out for months I decided to get a few pics.























































Still waiting on the motor controllers but I have ran it with y cables off the single controller and a small joystick. Plenty of power each motor is 300+ oz/in of torque and can draw up to 9 amps. I switched them out for much larger ones and I'm using the smaller ones for other stuff. One drives the turntable for the lidar. The other one with an encoder will take over leveling the platform from information from the IMU sensor soon. Same set up as the lidar nylon chain and sprockets with the motor being mounted over the center shaft under the main platform. Hope to have it fully operational shortly after the new year. Time is ticking away till its time for the summer competitions. All the software has been built and loaded up. I'll have to tweak the model some I suppose but barring a total screw up on the wiring it should start to roam as soon as the other motor controllers are installed.

Griz


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## fishingcacher (Mar 29, 2008)

Wow!


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## BobBobber (Aug 29, 2015)

Please post video when it's running. Love to see it in action. What a project! Tip of the hat to you!


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

*Won't be long now*

All the software is already done for its initial set-up. Just finished moving all the sensors over to the new TX1 computer.

I mess with it 2 or 3 hours most days. Not trying to finish it all in one week or anything. Buy a few parts and put them on. Actually its as much of a long term boredom fighter as anything. I have lots of plans for stuff to add on which are totally free of cost as its all software from there on out.

I had a Heathkit bot back in the 80's. Nothing like this one although it was a big hit at the bar I used to frequent.

I decided to go with these new ultra small motor controllers. Since I need 4 of them the ones I'd found were just too big. They are made by a small company of robotic crazies in Italy. Its a brand new board and just before it was supposed to ship they found a glitch. I don't have a programmer yet so I asked them to just wait till it was perfect then ship it. In the meantime I had plenty to do with the lidar and getting the software figured out.

It runs on ROS ( Robotic Operating System ) Developed at MIT and put into the public domain. Then Willow Labs packaged it up and put it out into the world. It has modules and packages for pretty much anything you want to do. Don't have to be a Phd in math these days to use all those fancy algorithms. I ran across a website called jetsonhacks.com. The guy does all kinds of stuff with nvidia jetson boards. There are complete instructions there on how to put together a bot with a kinect and a roomba create 2 base which is one of their vacuum bases redone for robotics. After reading that site and doing some reading on ROS I decided to give it a go.

I've done a lot of scratch built r/c cars so this is pretty much the same but on a bigger scale. All the parts come from Actobotics. They have thousands of pieces you can put together to build pretty much anything.

Takes one allen key and a phillips screwdriver to assemble or disassemble it. Adjustable ground clearance and wheelbase. And its set up to eventually go to a 6 wheel bogie type suspension like the Mars rovers have. Has enough power to haul around a dlsr and video camera. I'm going to mount rails on top for camera mounting. For sure I'll be doing some video. I'm going to start another youtube page for it. Wait till you see the 3-d point clouds the Zed camera makes. They are pretty sweet.

The Zed is what really got me interested in doing this. I've experimented with 3-d gopro set ups and a pair of webcams trying to do depth calculations but the results are nothing like what comes out of the Zed and you just have to plug it in and install the software. Then you can pick from depth maps, disparity maps, point clouds, stereo images or single images or any combination of them. Up to 2K resolution. Never thought I'd be able to play with machine vision and autonomous operation in my house.

Griz


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## MichaelW (Jun 16, 2010)

Thats pretty neat Griz.


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

*Thanks*

Packed with the newest tech. Been a steep learning curve for ROS and getting back up to speed on linux after a 15 year layoff. I've been into machine vision and controlling motors and communications for years. Just now that the parts required have gotten cheap enough for me to attempt it. Hoping to take it to Colorado next summer for the Autonomous Vehicle Challenge.

Griz


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