Re: Range finding/sensor advice
 

Hi, I've been working on a project simular to this.

My large scale project is to make a system for autonomous vehicles to use sensors to make autonomous decisions.

First I needed to learn some stuff and try things out. So for the past 2 months every day for about 6 hours my professor and I would meet at Barnes and Noble and work on an autonomous vehicle. So we set out to do a small auton vehicle first. We came up with lets try to make a vehicle that could drive to a light, and follow if it moved. At first I was planning on making my own vehicle but after exploring options I found an rc car from radio shack that would work. Heres a link to the car H2 Car.

So using pic chips and electronics we built our own driving boards and hooked them up to sensors and its working pretty good now. We made H bridges and used op amps and did alot... If you have any questions about how to do anything with the sensors or code email me at FirstJerseyKid@comcast.net. Im programming my car in "restricted" assembly.

Re: Range finding/sensor advice
 

My first robot was very similar to this. I took the top off a RAD robot and used the base as the base for my autonomous vehicle. I designed the entire control system based on two PIC18F458s (I wasn't ready to tackle 80 pin TQFPs as a sophomore). It took me five tries to make a motor controller that met my requirements. It was able to navigate effectively in my house using a polaroid ultrasonic ranger on a servo platform and bumper switches. It also had IR proximity sensors but I found the sonar to be more effective. It took me forever to write the code for it in assembly. About a year ago, I decided to rewrite the code using the student version of the microchip C compiler. Took me a half hour to write the code that took me weeks in assembly.