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Subject: 
Re: Help with my robot
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Tue, 12 Dec 2000 16:34:03 GMT
Original-From: 
AGH <JEDI_AGH@nospamYAHOO.COM>
Viewed: 
558 times
  
Thanks for your input, need to rethink what I am going
to do...

--- Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net> wrote:
Ahui Herrera wrote:

I got a problem.  I have a simple two motor robot • that I want to have a push
button cause the following:

1 hit the push button
2 robot turns 180 deg and move forward
3. after 15 feet robot stops
4 repeat 1 - 3

The problme i am having is that the robot will not • go straigt.  it is not
turning 180 degrees.

As lots of other people have said - you really need
rotation sensors.

If you don't have one - then a line-follower is an
option (as other
people have also suggested)...or I *suppose* you
could put a bright light
at either end of your 15 foot track and have the
robot aim for the brightest
light source after it's done an approximate 180
turn.  If you go this way,
you'll want the smallest (but brightest) light you
can find.

But to do this properly - you'd certainly be better
off with rotation
sensors - if you can do this - you should.

I suppose you could try to make your own rotation
sensor by taping
a black/white strip of paper around a large wheel
and use the light
sensor to count the number of stripes that go by.
This scheme makes
detecting the DIRECTION of travel rather difficult
though (not
impossible though - we can talk some more if you
want to go this
way).

However, in your case, we don't need a full-blown
rotation sensor.

For steering, you could arrange to have just one
narrow black strip
on the detector wheel and use a differential
connected to the two drive
wheels to rotate our detector wheel.  Then, when the
robot is going
straight, the black mark will remain under the light
sensor.  If the
robot veers off to the left or right, the black
stripe will no longer
be under the light sensor.  Unfortunately, you won't
know whether to
turn left or right to correct for this - so you may
have to turn left
for a little while - and if you don't see the black
stripe, turn right
until you see it.  The software to do that turns out
to be IDENTICAL
to the code for a line-following robot!

In a sense, the robot is following a line that it
carries along with it!

You could use the same technique to turn 180 degrees
accurately by
arranging the gearing such that the detector wheels
does an exact
whole number of rotations after a 180 turn.  Then
all your software
would need to be would be:

  * If the bump sensor hits, turn for X
seconds...which should
    be approximately right for a 180 degree turn.
  * Now, if we got it right, the black strip on the
detector
    wheel will be under the light sensor again.
  * Run a line-following algorithm until the bump
sensor
    hits again.

Your description of the problem said you had to
drive 15 feet.
That's rather hard to measure when you are doing
'line following'
because the robot has to stop frequently to find the
line again,
and when you do that, you tend to lose track of
distance travelled.

However, if what you really mean is to run until you
hit the bump
sensor again (which happens to be a distance of 15
feet) then
what I suggest could work.

Good Luck!
---
Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjbaker1@airmail.net>
              WorkEmail: <sjbaker@link.com>
              HomePage :
http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
              Projects : http://plib.sourceforge.net

http://tuxaqfh.sourceforge.net

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http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net





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