SquareBot
This little home robot is controlled through Labview, wirelessly through an XBee, which talks to a parallax multicore propeller board in BST. Each wheel spins independently and has a position servo to turn it. It has a little LCD screen for debugging, and a ping sensor mounted on servo for obstacle avoidance. There is an accelerometer on board which sends back to Labiew its current acceleration. This acceleration gets integrated twice to find position. From the sensed velocity, slip of the wheel can be estimated. From the estimated slip, I could characterize the type of terrain (albeit very crudely), but the difference between carpet and tile was apparent. Be sure to watch the videos below.
This picture shows the commands for the Squarebot (steer and drive) as well as the displayed acceleration sensed by the accelerometer. Velocity and position are derived by integrating in Labview. The noise was not completely filtered out and so it still shows very small acceleration.
Here is the screen shot of the robot moving and turning. The velocity and position is shown, but are not yet normalized.
Shows the heat sink and electronics for the motor
This picture shows the commands for the Squarebot (steer and drive) as well as the displayed acceleration sensed by the accelerometer. Velocity and position are derived by integrating in Labview. The noise was not completely filtered out and so it still shows very small acceleration.