Expert advice needed!!!

[Al Skierkiewicz]

One thing that broadcast pros have been using for years is cue tones recorded with the audio. I would record the descriptive audio tracks on a CD, add a defined length of silence between tracks, left channel only. Record the cue tones on right channel only. (Feed left channel to a speaker and right channel to the decoder.) The tone would signal the robot to move to the next position and the silence would give it time to get there. The tones are easily decoded with a PLL decoder chip and a few external components. 1kHz tones work fine. (NE567 is available from Digikey or Radioshack) You can use a cassette tape player which makes things easier but the audio degrades over time.

[Greg Needel]

I read this thread along time ago and thought i posted to it but i guess not....


I'm on a DARPA grand challenge team at RIT and we got some software donated that might make this project a lot easier for you. It is from evolution robotics and basically it is high tech vision processing software. Now there are a lot of applications built into this software here are some i think you could use.

*planned and repeatable navigational tracks using virtual markers on walls and distinguishing points to give location

*Image memory. take a picture of a persons face for instance and then when it it is running if the web cam shows that person in real-time it will be able to identify them

*runs on a laptop 128 mb 433 <---cheap

*easy integration with many different sensors and interfaces

the software is a little high in cost but we got it donated just by asking in an e-mail. I think there is a demo version on their website. and even if you don’t use this software for this it is really fun to have your web cam identify you when you turn it on. Available in Linux and windows



http://www.evolution.com/


Hope this helps good luck with your project and let us know how it goes