After analyzing our current state, and the current design of our robot, we've actually decided we can focus our efforts more efficiently by leveraging the 2D robotic arm control example that is already built into LabVIEW that uses the 3D picture control. This is not really a spoiler on our design or anything, but our robot arm is very eerily similar to the 3D Picture Control robotic arm example in LabVIEW (and I would imagine most arms for this year's competition are). So we're going to integrate the robotic arm example into our Dashboard so we can control the arm articulations in the picture control via data from the dashboard (coming from pots on our own robot arm articulations) instead of controls on the screen. Then we're going to modify the model on the screen to more closely resemble our arm and also give a reference point for the ground so we know how close our manipulator is to the ground.
Check it out, the example in the following relative path in LabVIEW 8.2:
National Instruments\LabVIEW 8.2\examples\picture\robot.llb
The top-level VI you want to look at inside the library is robot.vi.
This dashboard control will really only be used during driving when/if the robot arm is occluded from view, but the REAL benefits to having this is are:
- Robot Arm Visualization - It shows us where the Robot Controller code thinks the arm is at in a visualization that is quickly understood by anyone on our team. We've had problems in the past where a pot would come loose or something would go wrong, and it would take us way too long to figure out the problem.
- Operator driver practice - With the USB-DAQ device, we can give a robot operator practice time with the Dashboard and the simulator toolkit (the drivers can practice with previous year's robots). Unfortunately we don't have the resources to give something to our drivers such that the driver AND the operator can practice together, but some practice is better than no practice if you ask me.
- Code development Once we get a good mapping between the pots on our real robot arm and the angles in our visualization, it will allow us to tweak and visualize where presets are for the arm. Obviously you want preset positions for the arm to reach the various heights (floor, lower rack, mid rack, upper rack) so you can one-button press-it-and-forget-it-and-get-it-perfect-every-time kind of operation; we'll pull a trick from the LabVIEW CMUCam2 code and export a .h file that will contain our config information. Once we're done setting our presets, we'll just then compile the code with the header file and bam we don't have any additional code to muck with.
- Wow Factor - Obviously we're itching for the control award at Lone Star for the 2nd year in a row...
I'm investigating ways of getting a demo put together of the system - if we can assemble it all before we ship out our robot, if not then after the season is over we'll still put together a demo to show teams how to do it next year - Camtasia allows us to take computer-screen recordings at the same time as webcam recordings so we can have a split-screen of our dashboard and robot at the same time, so I think I will use that.
-Danny