Platooning

Two scenarios demonstrated :
1. Platooning with 3 bots
2. Catchup after Traffic Light

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd-Hof1N8Rk

Leader-Follower wit 2 3pi Bots

And we go in the reverse order here - tracing the dots backwards.
(Actually, we forgot to switch on the FF node on the third bot)
http://youtu.be/SCeRhbN6PYA

Working system with 3 3pi bots

A rough video of our working system has been uploaded : http://youtu.be/jJpMwqnmXUI.
Watch out for further updates.

Awesome Pi bots

This blog has not been updated from long, but for good reason. :-) We were writing our code for the project.

The awesome pi bots manufactured by pololu arrived few weeks ago. They are generally meant for line following and maze solving applications.

We are using these bots to simulate Vehicle behavior, and hence not using the line following capability of these bots

For wireless communication between two bots and bots and gateway firefly nodes have been integrated with the pi bots and powered by the pi bots supply. FireFly nodes talk to pi bots via UART.

Markers have been placed on these bots so that they can be detected by camera using AR Tool kit.

We found that AR tool kit gives some error in the postion data, and some times completely irrelevant data. Maybe this can be compared to a GPS system that has certain range of error ?

Given the above constraints and slow frame rate of 20 Hz and network delays, we are moving our bots at the slowest possible speed.

Videos showing our progress coming up soon!

Dec. 05 2011

1. 'Red Light' recognizable from camera.
2. Controllable sampling rates of camera

Nov. 25 2011

1. Fixed bugs of orientation difference.
2. Integrate slipstream with camera.
**SLIP: Serial Line Internet Protocol

Cool ARtoolkit demo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=4XZC76lQ2hc

Installation of ARToolkit on Ubuntu 10.04

I followed the steps here: http://www.kameda-lab.org/_local/imagelab.tsukuba.ac.jp/ubuntu1004+opencv21/ARToolKitk/index-e.html

In the process, you will need the following packages. Make sure they are installed so that ARToolkit could successfully make.

libxmu-dev, freeglut3-dev, xorg-dev, libjpeg-dev

A screenshot of test code of ARToolkit