Proof Of Concept : Wireless Rover : Poly-View (video)

Hi everyone,
                 Here's a follow up on my little project. It finally came together in a pretty special way. After some testing and a bit of trial-error, here's the basic applied concept of the robot moving around and responding to the Wii Nunchuck command. You can refer to my last post for a little schematic of the design.

Here's a little video of the actual project :


Poly-View (in progress) from Louis-Philippe Couture on Vimeo.

Basically, all the processing comes from two Arduino on the robot itself. There's also a third Arduino on the remote module that is interpreting the Nunchuck i2c output and packaging them in order to send them through the Xbee module (wireless remote control).

As for the two Arduino on the robot, they have two very different jobs.

The one on the top is the brain. It receive the different input of the Nunchuck through the wireless Xbee then modulate these input into movement control that he will transmit to the other Arduino (the motor control module).

You could say the the Arduino on the top is where most of the coding and software logic is. That's where the X and Y coordinates of the Nunchuck's analog thumb stick get translated into two different force vector for the wheel motors. That's also where the tilt and roll of the Nunchuck gets translated into Left/Right - Up/Down value for the two servos that hold the camera. Last and not least, it's also this micro-controller that handle the Hitachi LCD screen that's on the robot.

Now : what does the last Arduino (the bottom one) doing you ask? He's the one controlling the motors and the servos. I used a Motorshield that fits nicely on top of the Arduino. All that micro-controller does is communicate with his upstairs neighbor with i2c and receive commands to handle and execute on the motors. He interprets a long never ending string of ASCII characters to attribute the right values to each motor (left and right) and to each servo (Left/Right and Up/Down).

Concept : Wireless Rover Robot with Multi-View Camera

         Here's a new concept I'm going to experiment with: imagine this : a simple robot with moving capabilities and wireless remote control. Simple right? How about adding a dual processor on this. I was thinking two Arduino and a link between the two. That would offer two clock cycle, double memory, real time multitasking and since they are pretty cheap (about 25$), it shouldn't exceed my budget.

       What about the remote ? Of course I could try to get a simple RF remote and interface the signal but what about making my own? Possible ? How about another Arduino? I think that's a good idea since I will be able to encrypt my data between the remote and the robot and even use 802.11 (Wifi) technology (Xbee). This way, I won't really be as limited by the controller or the more than variable link quality. I still need something to control the robot though. I read a while about about interfacing a Wii Nunchuck. I could wire the remote with the Nunchuck.

       Now... how can I make this robot interesting ? How about a camera, on the robot itself so I can see what the robot see... Alright so a wireless video camera like this one would do the job.

   Here's a little sketch I made using Google Docs detailing my original idea :