Autonomous robotic camera platform
 

Building a robotic autonomous rover for competition and canyon crawling. It uses a Zed RGB-D camera to figure out where objects are and how to avoid them. Has a Lidar unit for after dark use. The motors can be controlled with an x-box controller, radio and rx, or serial from the onboard computers. Has WiFi and bluetooth. 2 Nvidia Jetson supercomputers. An Arduino gps inertial motion unit so it knows when its upside down and when its on a hill so you can apply more power etc. The combination of Zed Lidar IMU and GPS allow it to know where it is in the world how fast its moving and what direction its moving in. Has a pair of 720p cams as well and a mast for mounting a DLSR or Video camera or both. The Jetsons run Ubuntu Linux so several camera control programs are available. Looking at FPV units now so I can check it out real time.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...itingonZed.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...ot/Jetsons.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...orandwheel.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/.../Bot/truss.jpg

First test will be to make it around one of the local r/c tracks. 12 inches of articulation total length 24 inches. Calculated top speed is a shade over 7mph with the 350rpm geared motors I bought. Could go higher but the terrain I plan on using it on will require slow speeds and there will be a couple of thou worth of camera and lens on it so no need to take too many chances. I'll post up some vid when I get it working.

Griz

Version 2
 

Changed up a lot of things after doing a bit of testing. Came up with a new chassis design that has better ground clearance and is much lighter. All the tubing is carbon fiber now.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...50-5691-sm.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...50-5692-sm.jpg

Motors are working off the computer now getting close to having the Zed camera driving the thing.

Griz

very interesting!!!

Just bought a Nvidia TX1 for it. 64 bit 8 cores and a 256core GPU. Motor controller boards will be here any day. So I should be up and rolling soon. The TX1 is much better suited to doing the kind of vision stuff I want to do. With the TK1 the res was limited to 720p now I can do 1440p with a much higher frame rate as well on all modes. Just finished putting together the 360 deg lidar scanner for it. The sensor is a Pulsed Light Lidar Lite V2.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...t/360lidar.jpg

Here is a video of the Zed doing 3-D point clouds mounted on a drone.

https://youtu.be/Nun1HXqBEVY

Put voice recognition and speech synthesis on it the other day. I can tell it what to do with a bluetooth headset now.

Griz

Latest progress
 

Here are the latest pics of the rover. Just waiting on the motor controllers to finally arrive. When you get out on the bleeding edge anything can and does happen :) No biggie I'm in the middle of moving to San Antonio. Its 100 miles to any track from where I am now too far to just pop out for a couple of hours and get some shots. Anyways here is what the bot looks like at this point.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...t/GRZ_1954.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...t/GRZ_2009.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...t/GRZ_2002.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...t/GRZ_2018.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...t/GRZ_1996.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...t/GRZ_1993.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...t/GRZ_1947.jpg

The "driver" was part of a gag trophy I was awarded for my distinct driving style on the oval :)

Looks like mid Jan before it runs under its own power. I'll be sure and post up some video. In fact I'll be starting another Youtube channel just for bot stuff once its running.

Griz

A crazy piece of engineering there.

Latest Rover shots
 

Heading to Canyonlands soon to test out this beast. All my pics have disappeared due to dropbox cutting off links to pics for posting :(

http://a4.pbase.com/o10/29/1056729/1...S.8T6A0888.jpg

http://a4.pbase.com/o10/29/1056729/1...C.8T6A0880.jpg

http://a4.pbase.com/o10/29/1056729/1...g.8T6A0887.jpg

http://a4.pbase.com/o10/29/1056729/1...G.8T6A0894.jpg

http://a4.pbase.com/g10/29/1056729/2...4.QIq0xx2K.jpg
This is the latest version of the rover. Decided to buy a chassis. The other rover is still going as well. Might as well have two right :) Almost a self-driver its a little stupid still but I'm working on it. Electronics include a nvidia TX2 Bosch imu Scanse lidar Stereolabs camera Here GPS. No radio this puppy works over wifi or long range radios 10km at the short end of the range. The two antenna on top are for those radios. 2 channel telemetry on one channel and I run dsm packets up the other for control

https://youtu.be/KynW_O0wfHg

Griz

No more radio
 

Operating on a ROS stack now. One step away from autonomous. I'm giving it commands via the wifi hot spot on the bot in this video. The keyboard method sucks as you will see in the vid. I hooked up my xbox controller for the next test. Used to using it maybe I won't wreck again :)

https://youtu.be/v32dUqqmvSM

Griz