Project Athena: Tested BtBee
2012-08-30
Today we have tested the BtBee module that we bought from SimpleLabs (Chennai). We planned to demonstrate the voice recognition part of the application on coming monday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW-4tNPruWM
and here are something that came to my mind.
- we have decided to use stepper motors for driving the bot
- got to design the software design soon
- there is no user interface required
- clean modularity is very important
- going to write segments of the programs as separate program, for testing and then integrate them accordingly
- image processing module gonna be the main thread. at a only one functionality is being run by the microcontroller. for example only the stepper functionality will be running until the bot reaches the proximity of the object to pickup
- voice recognition: trying to access the DSP of Android phone and using pocket sphinx for voice input.
- image processing thread
- acquire the image
- find the object of interest
- center the object in the pic. i.e move the camera so that the object comes to the center of the image.
- then accordingly align the wheels of the motor, so that it can go straight to the object
- take three/four snapshots at different point as the bot moves and use kinematics and some simple maths to find the size of the object
- can we use the ultrasonic range finder for measuring the distance between the bot and the object.
- move towards the object so that we can grab it.
- pick it up and return to the initial position where the command was given
- initially we have planned to use three servos for arm control and now we try to test with a single servo grabber.
- so everything gotta be highly modularized.
- the command are saved in command files
like camera.upwards = CAM_UP camera.left = CAM_LEFT ..... etc..
- can we use GPS for tracing the path back? no GPS is power hungry and adds more complexity to the project.
- learn how to construct a delay circuit so that only one pin can be used to drive a stepper motor using four delay elements in series. you got it??