AIME Bot

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Autonomous Intelligent Mobile Explorer (AIME)

I am slowly working on an autonomous rover, that can map indoor and outdoor terrain. I have a basic design, and I have been slowly acquiring parts. I have some basic design drawings, but I need to CAD them up still. Here are my current plans for construction of the robot from easily available, and surplus parts.

Brains:

The current plan is to use an embedded PC as the brains, running either an Linux with the real-time kernel patches to make it RTLinux. A friend found some of these PCM-5862 PC-104, 266mhz MMX motherboards at surplus. Small form-factor. Runs on a 5v supply. Has lots of built-in goodies, like USB, keyboard, video, 4 serial ports, a parallel port and more.

This Should be perfect for the brains for my robot. Here is the board with a DIO-48 PC-104 board installed on it, and a 30gig laptop drive attached. I have used RedHat Linux 8.0 as the basic platform, and have installed the RT patches. Using a Linux platform will allow me to do all the high-level processing on the PC, and then dispatch work to various micro-controlled sub-processing units of my own design. I am using the balancing robot project as a test bed for various sub-processor boards.

Interface Control Units:

Interfacing the PC-104 with my sub-processor boards is handled with a DIO-48 board from Measurement Computing. It uses dual 8255 chips to give 48 bits of digital IO, and doesn't need a fancy device driver in order to access it from RT-Linux.

I have designed various sub-processing units using Microchip PIC microcontroller chips. I can then interface to these PIC's using parallel IO from the DIO board. This sub-units, handle things like sonar, servo control, motor control, IR sensors, and even IMU.

Wireless:

The robot should have an onboard 802.11b card for upload/download of software and communicating with it. It will make uploading and download software a breeze, and as well should make for some interesting remote control. The PCM-5862 has a built-in Ethernet port, which could easily be made wireless through the use of a wireless bridging product like the Linksys WET-11.

Navigation and Remote Control:

When operating outdoors, GPS is important. I have a small PIC based unit that can read the serial output of a Garmin GPS unit. My plan is to hardwire this unit into the power supply, and get real-time GPS coordinates

It would also be nice to be able to remotely control the robot for doing things like learning by example. A standard PWM R/C unit like I use for model airplanes would be ideal. I designed my own R/C receiver interface unit that is currently in-use on the balancing robot.

Sound and Speech:

One of the nice things about using Linux, is that it has built-in sound driver support. The PCM-5862 has a 16-bit, Soundblaster compatible sound card on-board. Generating sounds is easy. Speech synthesis can be accomplished using the University of Edinburgh Festival Speech Synthesis package for Linux.

Vision:

Ultimately, I would like to do some stereoscopic vision work. IBM has a great open source computer vision project going through Sourceforge. The OpenCV package runs great on Linux! I have this PC-104 video card from Sensoray, that can capture single channel 30fps color video. I have a cool miniature video camera to use with it to give the robot some vision.

Power:

I am going to power the robot using standard, sub-c NiCad cells, or NiMh cells like I used for my R/C Airplanes. I have packs containing 22 cells each, that could be mounted in parallel to provide 12Ah of power in a 10 pound pack. I use cells in these packs from Robotic Power Solutions.

To power all the electronics, a friend of mine found a bunch of these 24V DC/DC converters at surplus. They are made by Digital Power Corp. They take 20-36V in and put out +5V/10A, +12V/4A, -12V/2A, and -5V/2A. I have set this up and it powers the motherboard, an IBM Travelstar laptop hard-drive, floppy, and a CD-ROM with no problem. Total draw is about 1.5A at 26V. So far, everything is coming together great.

Motors & Control:

I picked up a couple of these IFI Robotics Victor 883 electronic speed controls. They take 24V in, can drive a motor linearly, and use a PWM signals for control. I have a motor control board I was using on the large balancing robot that can control this unit well. The frequency response was not fast enough for balancing, but might work well on a 4-wheeled robot.

Here are some surplus 24V motors I found, that have built-in shaft encoders, that may work well. I still need to do some more testing to determine how well they will work.

Mobility:

Some neat-o Go-Kart tires, mounted on aluminum rims. I need to make some custom, aluminum hubs so that I can mount these tires to a 5/8" steel drive shaft.