End of Year Project
Introduction
I have looked into these areas so far;
- Autonomous robot with lidar sensor – no actual purpose, perhaps avoidance of objects in a room, mapping area etc.
Further extension of idea – automaton riding on the mobile vehicle, interactive with onlookers
Pros:
I will learn a lot and it may result in an impressive installation
I ordered the parts anyway, I was curious and will continue with it in my own time anyway
Cons:
Seems like a huge learning curve to throw all these paths into one project.
Is it art or an engineering project?
Terrifying learning curve
2. Small, not micro robot(s) large enough to mount small motors, scaled up into 5-10 robots to investigate flocking behaviours, emergence.
Pros:
Good project to push computational content
Cons
Not very interesting, been done loads of times already, e.g. 1000 micro robot emergence flocking project by MIT[1] other methods using overhead sensor [1] ref on plans at Github here[1][1]
3. Using O-Drive and powerful brushless motors to animate a fast moving fully enclosed sculpture. E.g. dangerous sharp objects narrowly missing each other enclosed in a Perspex case.
Cons:
minimal computational content, unlikely to progress with this.
Parts already sourced in any case.
Pros:
Startling and highly dramatic piece, interesting.
1.1
Lidar and ROS operating system, investigate this with ODrive [1]motor driver board and Lidar control board [1]
1.2 Cartographer [1] and SLAM [1]library; Google’s mapping open source code for Lidar.
1.2.1
Useful course on SLAM and introduction to robot mapping
1.3 ROS [1]Robot Operating System (best installed in Linux Ubuntu[1])
2.1
Investigate further into I2C and AtTiny with small battery, continuous rotating modified micro servos for power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5vpwVFMPqs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_mobile_robot
[1] https://github.com/ShapeLab/SwarmUI
[1] https://github.com/swarminterface/Zooids
[1] https://odriverobotics.com/
[1] https://www.getsurreal.com/product/lidar-controller-v2-0/
[1] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-cartographer.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping
[1] https://www.ros.org/
[1] https://ubuntu-mate.org/raspberry-pi/