The Complete Evolution of the 'Terminator'
- The first logical step in this project would be to assemble the robot platform. But that would be far too easy - and logical. Since our robot platform didn't arrive in the mail on-schedule, the first item in the design process was the construction of the Pan Tilt mechanism:
- Next the Arduino Duemilanove was attached.
- I wanted to make things interesting. So I hacked a Nintendo Wii Nunchuck to control the servo-motors on the Pan Tilt.
- The Wii Nunchuck has an on-board ADXL330 3-axis accelerometer. Rolling the Nunchuck side-to-side turned the Pan Tilt left and right; Tilting up-and-down moved it up-and-down as well.
- Finally, the robot platform came in! Unassembled - “NO!”
- Base assembled, bypass capacitors and motor leads soldered on.
- A shot of the bypass capacitors soldered between the DC motors of the Terminator.
- Sides and top platform assembled.
- Fully assembled platform.
- Two 7.2vdc NiMH rechargeable batteries were soldered in series - fully charged, they gave a decent voltage supply:
- Next, the 'Scorpion XL' was attached, power and motor leads were connected to the terminals.
- Labeling the motor leads is extremely helpful!
* Then, the R/C cables of the motor-controller, as well as the the Sharp GP2D12 IR rangefinder, were connected to the Arduino.
- Since the network camera that we order weeks ago never came in, I hacked a 'Blackfin Camera' from a Surveyor Corporation SRV-1 mobile robot and used this as our network camera. The camera uses a Lantronix Wifi module to communicate with a shell client on a nearby computer or laptop.
- Here is a photo of the robot from a far:
- Next item on the agenda was to get the robot to process the image-stream captured by the camera. I accomplished this using 'RoboRealm' Machine Vision software; by applying a red color-filter, and other filters to eradicate noise:
- 'RoboRealm' was even able to determine the position the red circle appeared on the screen!
- Above is the image after a red-color filter has been applied.
