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

Technical Programming
1

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.

2

What are you using for communications…the IFI radios?

3

Have you considered turning a laptop into a LabVIEW Real-time Target to put on the robot?

4

To send video from the Robot PC to the Base Station, you need to flatten the image into a string. make sure it has JPEG compression and then send over your network. then receive. convert to image and display.

Fairly simple to do. message me on skype if you need further help

We had a miniITX motherboard on our 2010 robot doing image processing. Also redid all of the image transfer code from the robot to the DS and the dashboard to display it from scratch to get 30FPS video.

That’s easier said than done. lots of compatibility constraints for the realtime target.

5

no SATA hard drive support is a killer. And also in my case, the TCP IP stack had issues.

6

Most likely 802.11g using AdHoc between the two PCs.

No, but what I have right now is working great. The only lag in the system is between the two PC’s, which is not even noticable on a closed network. It is, however, noticable from 1/2 a mile away in your dorm room while you’re in a remote desktop connection to the base station. :smiley:

That’s what I was thinking. I was trying to flatten it to a string using the PNG format, but I got a string too long to send over the network. I’ll give the JPEG a try.

I’ve also been looking at the MiniITX Motherboards on Newegg.com. The only problem with going that route is I have to get a 12V DC input power supply to make them work, plus the lack of display or any controls for that matter (mouse, keyboard) will make operating the robot PC very difficult to do if the remote desktop connection fails for some reason. I can get a netbook for fairly cheap, and I’m also juggling around the idea of using my old Dell E1505 on the robot and sticking my OCZ SSD drive that I have for my MacBook Pro in there for the competition. I would have to run a power inverter to make it work though.

7

Got the video working very well. At 50FPS (which is above my built-in webcam’s FPS anyway…), I’m using about 10% of my total bandwidth for my 54Mbps wireless G connection.

I think this is all very doable.

8

If you want to try an atom based mini-itx, look at some of these power supplies.
http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/power_supplies/car_power
This may work for a netbook.
http://www.logicsupply.com/products/dcdc_usb

9

Does this meet your specs?

http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc2/fit-pc2-specifications/