How I spent August 2007
This month, I have followed the ECA course at the Technical Faculty at my university (the University of Southern Denmark). The course was about combining the knowledge gathered from different courses and putting them together in the form of an autonomous car which had to complete several tracks, which were marked by a black strip of tape on white background.
We and three other teams of 4-5 people were given a remote controlled car, one month and access to all the components we needed. I was primarily in charge of the sensor stuff in front of the car, which told the microcontroller (an ATMega128) where the black strip of tape was located. Here's a picture of my "beautiful" work with 16 IR diodes and 5 IR photo transistors.
To avoid the sunlight, we pulsed the diodes at 40 kHz and added this high-pass filter (yes, I know it doesn't look like it's going to work, but it did!).
The object was to complete several tracks at a competition one month after we started the course. Here's our car on one of the tracks, the spiral track. It didn't do as well as we had hoped - "Muggi" apparently couldn't take the competition pressure...
We were tied with another group just before the final, so we had to race them again. Unfortunately, our car wasn't very fast on the race track, so we didn't make it to the final. The video below shows the two cars that were in the final - the "Combine Harvester" on the outer track was the overall winner.
If you have a chance to take this course (or any that have the same objective), go for it! It's so much fun and you learn a lot in that month.
(also, now Martin Morissette isn't the only ambassador with autonomous vehicle skills :) )
We and three other teams of 4-5 people were given a remote controlled car, one month and access to all the components we needed. I was primarily in charge of the sensor stuff in front of the car, which told the microcontroller (an ATMega128) where the black strip of tape was located. Here's a picture of my "beautiful" work with 16 IR diodes and 5 IR photo transistors.
To avoid the sunlight, we pulsed the diodes at 40 kHz and added this high-pass filter (yes, I know it doesn't look like it's going to work, but it did!).
The object was to complete several tracks at a competition one month after we started the course. Here's our car on one of the tracks, the spiral track. It didn't do as well as we had hoped - "Muggi" apparently couldn't take the competition pressure...
We were tied with another group just before the final, so we had to race them again. Unfortunately, our car wasn't very fast on the race track, so we didn't make it to the final. The video below shows the two cars that were in the final - the "Combine Harvester" on the outer track was the overall winner.
If you have a chance to take this course (or any that have the same objective), go for it! It's so much fun and you learn a lot in that month.
(also, now Martin Morissette isn't the only ambassador with autonomous vehicle skills :) )
Very cool!
Indsendt af Anil Gulecha 2007-09-02, 04:48:46 #
Hi Lars.
Cool indeed... but I see you chose the easy way out, and used wheels. Take a look on our quadrupedal robot at my home page :-)
By the way... legs suck as a form of propulsion on robots. There is a reason why people normally use wheels. But watch the video yourself, and make a judgement.
Indsendt af Bjørn Grønbæk 2007-09-02, 05:35:16 #
Awesome. I was just wondering what you've been doing all this time =).
Indsendt af Teera 2007-09-03, 04:52:54 #