Home-brewed Robot Control System (2 computer running LabVIEW, with the old 2008 RC)

[RyanN]

Not really needing help (yet!), but I figured I would share a cool project I am currently working on in college.

Well, my University doesn't participate in any FIRST robotics competitions, but the Industrial Education department participates in a relatively small robotics competition designed by ATMAE.

Anyway, the past years, the team didn't have an autonomous period of any sort. They've just been using a remote control vehicle controller to drive the robot for the past few years, and they have been really successful taking home the trophy.

Well, this year, they changed things. They have an autonomous. My Microprocessor instructor let me know about the competition since he knew I was big into robotics. I took up the job. I'm bringing a real robot controller to the team, the 2008 IFI Robot Controller from Team Fusion's dismantled robot.

The competition requires us to drive the robot from a far distance away, so we cannot drive with a line-of-sight. When we reach the center of the field, we have to switch to autonomous control to find a 8" pipe buried in the sand. My plan is to use two laptops and the IFI controller as the control system.

There will be a plain laptop at the driver station (like the classmate) with two USB joysticks attached. There will be a small netbook or nettop PC in the robot with a SSD drive installed due to the extreme vibrations that will be involved on our robot. The PC on the robot will tell the IFI RC what to do using the programming port.

So far, I have the basic communication from the base station to the robot working with a few small bugs that I plan on knocking out this weekend (basically just verification that the RC received the commands that were sent, and to resend the commands if incorrect)

One thing that I have not figured out yet is how to send live video from the robot PC to the base station PC. We’re planning on just getting a USB webcam to connect to LabVIEW with.

Right now, I can use the webcam with LabVIEW on the robot PC just fine. I can do video analysis and track round objects. It’s the part about getting it to the base station PC.