Let's call it a robot

edmunds

Senior Member
Dear all,

I consider the little line follower project successfully finished - here is a video of my little lorry travelling at the target speed of 50km/h. I have also posted to the finished projects forum where you will also find full code as of the moment the car was filmed.

There are many things that I know can be improved, but this will have to be done later as a project is only a project when it has a start and an end :). The goal was reliable line tracking at scale 50km/h and this is doing it while the battery lasts. It can actually travel quite a bit faster than that, but then it sometimes goes off rails.

This has been a great learning experience and out of many, I want to stress three things I'm taking from this project.

1) Simulator is a great tool. On (Sh)Windows.
2) Code can always be more efficient.
3) I now know how to quickly assess how fast a piece of code is and thus can benchmark one solution to another.

Thank you all for your inputs - the great ideas that have found a way into the code of the current solution and those that go on the shelf when the time comes to improve the current version.

Cheers,

Edmunds
 

rossko57

Senior Member
That's brilliant ! What's next ... route planning to handle turnouts? Collision avoidance? Or miniaturizing for 1/87 Smart car or motorcycle combo?
 

Buzby

Senior Member
It looks great. Well done !

Now make it better :)

The peak sensitivity of your CCD is in the near IR band, so replacing your white LEDs with invisible IR LEDs will make it more realistic.

Then you can go one step further and get rid of the white line altogether.

Well, not get rid of it completely, just hide it.

Lots of apparently 'black' films are very transparent to IR, even very deep red films look black.
Covering your track from edge to edge with such a film will hide the white line, and make the truck look totally autonomous.

And putting two 'hidden' lines will let trucks keep to their side of a 'real' white line down the middle.

Cheers,

Buzby
 

erco

Senior Member
Congrats, it's tracking perfectly! Well done, it's really great to see how you persevered through your project and emerged victorious!
 

edmunds

Senior Member
Now make it better :)
Buzby, I don't want it to look autonomous. The goal is to make it autonomous :).

I have tested IR when the sensor was connected to the breadboard, so I know it does work. However, I'm not convinced I want the invisible light, because the further plan is to deploy 6DOF unit and try to store data gathered by it and a rev counter (=virtual line?) onto a big FRAM. Then, remove the line and try to repeat the path based on that data alone. So a visual indication of 'In route learning mode' does not hurt and is probably even good.

There was recently a game with cars controlled from iPhones presented on an Apple event that did the film over white line trick. The line was actually encoded with 'teeth', so cars were reading more than just a line. While it was really cool, it would be no different from existing model train layout car systems in lots of preparations needed to actually run the cars, which is especially prohibitive on old model train layouts.

Besides being an interesting project for our big exhibition model train layout, getting indoor navigation to work this way is a very cool project despite all the learning and tripping over things that have not worked has taken a few years already.

Now, the next practical step is to physically add the rev counter (segmented disk on the motor axle and Sharp GP2S60) and make picaxe to read it more or less in the background. Then I need to solder ST LSM6DS3 (LGA14 package) onto something. The closest I have is a breakout board for LGA16. Lets see if that works. And fire it up via HI2C or HSPI. I guess what I'm saying is I will be back with more problems :D.

Cheers,

Edmunds
 
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edmunds

Senior Member
That's brilliant ! What's next ... route planning to handle turnouts? Collision avoidance? Or miniaturizing for 1/87 Smart car or motorcycle combo?
Collision avoidance of sorts is there - https://youtu.be/7E2OmiezdJA

Here is the previous version of the chassis assembly - https://youtu.be/lOViiUYjHRo. While it has evolved since the video, it pretty much sums up the basics. I don't know why I forgot about this video before - could have helped to understand better what is it I'm fighting :).

A motorcycle combo has been a dream of mine. I have even found a suitable model, but no time for it so far.


Cheers,

Edmunds
 
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