by bananasbandanas on 11/15/2018, 8:39:52 AM
by a1k0n on 11/15/2018, 12:41:37 AM
Didn't mention it in the post, but info about the car hardware and all the code is at https://github.com/a1k0n/cycloid
by drivers99 on 11/15/2018, 12:55:35 AM
This is really inspiring. I played around with converting an RC car to self-driving with an arduino but it was very simplistic. It used an ultrasonic sensor (Parallax "Ping)))" sensor) to try to keep a specific range of distance from a wall to its left. It wasn't aware of its angle so it had a positive feedback loop in its reactions which caused it to oscillate more and more out of control. Just knowing there are people are there playing around with this for fun makes me want to get back into it.
by elwell on 11/15/2018, 5:07:33 PM
Wow, really the best email address spam protection method [0]:
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"MC-M/NZGB6Q,I0VGB6a0FbN<VG.6Q\\bNb7^@`X=N@`XQaOVX:^]NX=:Z8PY]B`:>P"
"NY8^$#SM):XA"[_/6]-35>>_++%6&1;k++);putchar(k[" _/\\\n,`)('<-"]);}}
by adrianN on 11/15/2018, 9:10:50 AM
A similar discipline is Micromouse, where robots have to solve mazes and then race the path they found.
by hobolord on 11/15/2018, 1:03:51 AM
This is great, I did a robotics course in uni that was essentially this. We never took it further than PID control though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDqfKm4Ovcg
That was a fun time in uni
by cmontella on 11/15/2018, 1:04:55 PM
Very cool! We ran a competition like this once for undergrads: https://vaderlab.wordpress.com/roscar-robot-stock-car-autono...
It had to be a little more complex than line following, because at one point in the track there are a bunch of line crossings. So you had to do some mapping and tracking too in order to stay in the right lane.
It's really fun seeing how fast you can make them go. One team maxed out the speed on the platform.
by TaylorAlexander on 11/15/2018, 12:59:33 AM
Awesome post! I really need to attend the robo cars event. I’m working slowly on my own autonomous robot:
by msadowski on 11/15/2018, 1:11:47 PM
That's super interesting! How do you generate those canvases showing the algorithm behaviour? I think such animations could be very useful for teaching PID tuning.
If you don't mind I would love to add this article in my next WeeklyRobotics (https://weeklyrobotics.com/) issue.
by Already__Taken on 11/15/2018, 12:22:50 PM
Looking forward to seeing this thing remember the line each lap and refine its curve. At that point you're then working on traction control problems wouldn't you?
by SubiculumCode on 11/15/2018, 4:55:04 AM
This is pretty dang cool, imo.
There is a similar competition in Germany called the CaroloCup. Here is a video of our run when I was still a student [1].
We used model-predictive control which evaluated about 10k trajectories with look-ahead, which works really well even when tires begin to degrade after a few minutes. You can see the effects in the video towards the end, where the car starts to slide, but the controller manages to catch it in time.
Our CV was a bit more complex as we had to deal with missing line segments. We pre-processed the camera image with a distance transform, then used an optimization pass written in opencl to fit a 3rd-order polynomial to the image.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of_D_Z9gbeg