Robotics-s09
From MCIS Wiki
Robotics
The Western State College of Colorado's Computer Science Department has received a Fisher Price PowerWheels toy that has been converted into an autonomous outdoor robot from Harvey Mudd College. The robot came with everything needed to drive and steer the vehicle and a basic openCV C++ project to build upon, allowing us to set our own goals.
Milestones and Activities
Spring and Summer 2009
We managed to control our autonomous robot jeep, AJ, with simple color-blob tracking and eventually with more sophisticated shape-tracking using Hough circle algorithms and inverted color-space blobs with a special expanded blob library for OpenCV.
Our future goals are to utilize edge-detection algorithms (Hough or whichever proves to be most effective) to guide our robot down a hallway and around Hurst Hall. We also plan to include aspects of the blob/shape tracking along with whatever other required algorithms to allow AJ to detect and identify signs or symbols placed around Hurst, such as combination's of simple shapes (triangles, circles, squares, etc.)
Summer Trip to California
The programs and Professor John Peterson went to CA over the Summer to attend the (International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence) IJCAI Conference at Harvey Mudd College.
Fall '09
- Began developing the communication protocol for interacting between the C++ OpenCV library and the Python Arduino board.
- Set up a svn repository for easy project versioning. --Details--
- Shared the final project from IJCAI to everyone with working machine and began studying it to make sure everyone is on the same page
- Finally got Hough Line Transform working. --Details--
- Presented Project Update to WSC CIS and Mathematics Departments
- Blurbs from the Programmers/Coders
- End of the Semester Code Update with Documentation
Spring 2010
Robot Checkout and Charging
Robot is currently stored in 107a. Battery is not charging
Please note it here in the wiki if/when you have checked the robot out or started the battery charging and when you intend to use it.
Battery should be charged for 18 hours to reach full charge from being dead and not charged more than 30 hours
Thank You
