Assistance with a line follower robot please!
Kayduh
Posts: 9
Hey guys! This is my first post here on parallax, I am excited to get to know everyone! Anyways before I get started let me just say I am in no way an expert programmer, engineer or anything of that sort so please excuse my lack of "advance" knowledge I am teaching myself as I go. I have a little experience with c++ from other little things here and there in the past but nothing major... Before I start on my little project adventure here I would like to get some feed back on the hardware I have chosen and also any feed back towards the logical process of the project is always nice, sometimes things just seem to work out in my head and don't always translate very well in to actual application. Anyways here's what I have in my head so far!
I am going to create a path / maze whatever you would like to call it with one start point and multiple "branches" throughout my house. For example the start point in the living room which proceeds through the hall way then branches off to each of the bedrooms, restroom, the study, etc... I would like to create a line follower robot that I can send commands to wirelessly and tell it to go to the individual rooms.
Hardware wise, I am planning on using the boe-bot robot kit as the basis to the robot since it has a chassis, motors, micro controller and everything included. Next I am looking at adding the QTI Line Follower AppKit to use as the sensors for the line following application. And finally using the RN-42 Bluetooth Module to communicate wirelessly from my PC to send the commands for where I would like the robot to go.
Software wise, this is where it gets trickier for me but I know if I hit a wall I can find help and guidance in the right direction here! Following the "how to guide" by Andy Lindsay for line followers I can create the basic line follower robot. From what I have researched and seen via youtube, the boe-bot will be able to navigate a closed track however not one with multiple paths throughout my house, especially if I want it to go to a certain room and not just randomly along the line. To fix this I was thinking of creating a "t-intersection" at the entrance of each room so that when the robot passes the intersection and all 4 sensors detect a line at the same time it can call a function to increment a counter and tell it to either turn or continue straight depending on which intersection it is at (the robot should know which intersection it is at depending on the counter). And using the counter method I could guide the robot to each room, for example to get to the master bedroom the program would follow the line like normal but only turn left in to the bedroom IF the robot comes to an intersection and the counter is incremented "x" amount of times. Would this logic be the correct way of implementing this? Is there a simpler way or more "common" way of approaching something like this?
Hopefully after that works I can implement this guide by Jessica Uelman to integrate the Bluetooth in to the project. The Bluetooth is the last thing on my mind build wise towards this robot, my mind has been wrapped around how I am going to get the robot to navigate the house.
For anyone that interested the inspiration for this project is my 14 year old chocolate lab she has arthritis, and has trouble walking for more than 5-10 minutes at a time before she needs to take a rest. Its difficult for me to talk her for walks now especially because a few laps around the park now can take upwards of an hour, it cuts in to my work time seeing as how I work from home. With this robot I was thinking i can maybe rig up a little box that the robot can pull that has a treat in it so she can follow it around the house and get some sort of exercise when I don't have time to take her to the park.
Thank you in advance for any feedback / input everyone!
I am going to create a path / maze whatever you would like to call it with one start point and multiple "branches" throughout my house. For example the start point in the living room which proceeds through the hall way then branches off to each of the bedrooms, restroom, the study, etc... I would like to create a line follower robot that I can send commands to wirelessly and tell it to go to the individual rooms.
Hardware wise, I am planning on using the boe-bot robot kit as the basis to the robot since it has a chassis, motors, micro controller and everything included. Next I am looking at adding the QTI Line Follower AppKit to use as the sensors for the line following application. And finally using the RN-42 Bluetooth Module to communicate wirelessly from my PC to send the commands for where I would like the robot to go.
Software wise, this is where it gets trickier for me but I know if I hit a wall I can find help and guidance in the right direction here! Following the "how to guide" by Andy Lindsay for line followers I can create the basic line follower robot. From what I have researched and seen via youtube, the boe-bot will be able to navigate a closed track however not one with multiple paths throughout my house, especially if I want it to go to a certain room and not just randomly along the line. To fix this I was thinking of creating a "t-intersection" at the entrance of each room so that when the robot passes the intersection and all 4 sensors detect a line at the same time it can call a function to increment a counter and tell it to either turn or continue straight depending on which intersection it is at (the robot should know which intersection it is at depending on the counter). And using the counter method I could guide the robot to each room, for example to get to the master bedroom the program would follow the line like normal but only turn left in to the bedroom IF the robot comes to an intersection and the counter is incremented "x" amount of times. Would this logic be the correct way of implementing this? Is there a simpler way or more "common" way of approaching something like this?
Hopefully after that works I can implement this guide by Jessica Uelman to integrate the Bluetooth in to the project. The Bluetooth is the last thing on my mind build wise towards this robot, my mind has been wrapped around how I am going to get the robot to navigate the house.
For anyone that interested the inspiration for this project is my 14 year old chocolate lab she has arthritis, and has trouble walking for more than 5-10 minutes at a time before she needs to take a rest. Its difficult for me to talk her for walks now especially because a few laps around the park now can take upwards of an hour, it cuts in to my work time seeing as how I work from home. With this robot I was thinking i can maybe rig up a little box that the robot can pull that has a treat in it so she can follow it around the house and get some sort of exercise when I don't have time to take her to the park.
Thank you in advance for any feedback / input everyone!