Ready to expand!

This Monday the long awaited USB to Serial adapters arrived. This means that all crickets can finally be connected to the the computer. This should make the localization software more precise!

Now it is just a matter of installing them on the desktop pc and all the net-books. Luckily this is not much work!

Little robots grow

Dear all, I am here in this late hour session, just to show the amazing job of today (or yesterday), in the hardware shop.. (thanks to Ron). Here is our new bot!


The UKF is getting there, the outlier rejection is in place, now we have to calibrate better the whole procedure.

slaap lekker,
-a

Occam Razor

After two days of work we implemented the Passive mode on the mini-laptop. And here a crazy thing happened.. the estimation procedure worked fine with the range measurements alone, it worked fine with the odometry alone, but, when we tried to put the sensor on the robot it didn't work at all. .. after some unspeakably rude actions, using the Occam razor, we figured out that the source of such a mess was the EM interference of the iRobot on the Cricket clock. We investigated that and we defined as 10 cm the height where the sensor should be placed . We did a basic drawing of the mounting mechanism. We should re-look into the callback stuff now. And we should develop a outliers rejection procedure for the ones still remaining.

Last, a new Cricket batch is arrived!

fijn weekend

Towards autonomy

Small steps towards autonomy: frustrated by the active mode, I implemented a passive mode on the mini-laptop. So our robots will have complete autonomy.. yeah! So far, I decided for a callback/timer solution for estimation/control, and it is working ok if the robot is going straight. We do have problems if the robot is turning (the filter doesn't catch the motion of the robot, basically because it slips --> to check). Technically, I put the rs as interface between the mini-laptop and the irobot, it works smoothly; I implemented a UKF (which is still to refine and we should put this together with a Multi-lateration for "bad" situations) .. The rs is not working for the Cricket motes, but with the mini-laptop, the serial connection works much better anyway.

Last but not least: cables and connectors have arrived for the external power systems for the Cricket motes. Ron is going to work at this within this week.

have a nice night folks, :P