So this is a lego Mindstorm robot which we've hacked together into a semi
Autonomous Robot which should be able to drive around the room on its own
this robot is a lego Mindstorm with a battery pack strapped on top and
a raspberry PI underneath and raspberry Pi
Send signals to the little receiver on top to control the motors now once you have control like that
You can you can program the PI to essentially control the robot it can drive around on its own
Semi autonomously currently I've got this infrared controller
Which sends in print signals from the remote to the receiver on top?
This was initially how we received the robot with a few bits and bobs plugged on top including the Pi
Then we've just hacked together a bit of solution, so that we could automate the control using the sensors instead
We've got a raspberry Pi on the back. Which is Pi model B
And we've got a breadboard on top for only little wires on and we've got
infrared led which sends out a signal we pulsed this led at a certain oscillation which Corresponds to the
Signals you can receive from the receiver on the machine so that essentially allows us to control the robot itself we also have some
ultrasonic Sensors plugged into the front or back left and right
Obviously on each side and what we do here is we essentially we do recall what we do Marcopolo
And then we calculate the distance to the objects
Immediately in front back left and right they send that one signal and it will bounce off all of the obstacles in the room
It'll send a resultant signal back which will get received by the receiver
So in a sense you're screwing Marco, and then polo getting the signal back and then the robot does a bit of a naive
Naive search and essentially moves in the direction where it's not going to hit things
Now this isn't perfect
The robot itself is actually quite naive
So the sensors on the front the back left on the right they're good for about thirty degrees of range
But there are blind spots on the corners and the front and the back by the wheels
Yeah
sometimes this isn't great because you can hit very thin obstacles which the sensors don't necessarily get in range something such as a
pole or something
So it's it's not it's not perfect
But it's good enough if you want to send it into an environment where you can't necessarily go here
We're just trying it out with some different objects in a smaller environment we hacked together
so we've got a small PC in a bit of wood and
Just a small little cage to drive around in the idea
Is that they should robot should be able to drive around on its own and not crash on the walls most of the time?
Again, not perfect, but it's a good little demonstration of a naive a naive search Row
Potentially, so I'm just going to plug it in to the monitor. We can connect to this wirelessly
This robots normally setup on a static ip but due to some difficulties in the new Network. We've got installed. It's not working right now
So I'm just gonna plug it into the monitor and do it that way instead
So it's a raspberry Pi model B
And it's got the standard operating system on which is a thing they call it noobs in terms of wiring each
Sensor has a ground and a five volt rail, and then it's got input and output signals
so the white wire is to send a signal to pulse the sensor and
The back wire is to receive a signal back so essentially each one of these sensors has four cables
And those four cables are powered and controlled by the raspberry Pi which is underneath the breadboard
We would have soldered this together
but
We're a rapid prototyping when we made this and we just wanted to get something that works the raspberry Pi operating systems booted up now
So we should be able to access the come online. I've written a program called Roma in C++
We should allow the robot to drive around semi autonomously
Such a hack it's taking in data from the sensors, and it's thinking about where it's going to drive
So the idea is it should be constantly polling the sensors in order seeing what data it can collect from the environment
so this data will consist of
Distance Data around it and more specifically the measurements are in centimeters
So the the Sensors themselves have a range of about four meters which means the robot can drive in an area of about four meters
Squared but again
It's it's a naive robot so it may not pick up things below the sensors or may not pick up things out of the range
Of the sensors, but it's not got a tilt sensor either has it no no there's no. There's no accelerometer on it
It would have been something related if we had more, but and I think that's what's called backing yourself into a corner. Yeah
nothing's perfect
So it reaches the right depth in your brain
We're taking a baseline now that means we're asking max to relax while we take an average of his brain activity