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Subject: 
Re: Ultrasonic sensor interactions
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Sun, 21 May 2006 12:09:19 GMT
Viewed: 
2453 times
  
In lugnet.robotics, David Schilling wrote:
In lugnet.robotics, steve <sjbaker1@airmail.net> wrote:
John Barnes wrote:

Pulses emitted by "the other sensor" can arrive at just the wrong moment,
creating a false range reading. Clever numerical filtering can eliminate this
kind of thing under certain circumstances - for example you may be following
parallel to a wall and obtaining a series of readings which should be all within
a likely range. If you suddenly receive a reading which is outside the expected
range, you might discard it. In otherwords, if you maintain an average and only
accept readings within a certain range of that average as bona fide, then you
may be able to guard against this kind of interference to a certain extent.

A better alternative would be to develop protocols in which the NXT
controllers use their communications to tell each other what they are
about to do.  If you can sent a message that says "I'm about to do an
ultrasound 'ping' - so you'd better ignore any readings you are about
to get and refrain from doing a 'ping' of your own."  then do a range
measurement and finally send another message "Thanks - I'm done with
the ultrasound system for a while."...then the systems can arrange to
avoid interfering with each other.

After all, robots move slowly - you are unlikely to need high speed
readings.

I guess it all assumes that you have software control of the ultrasound
sensor so that you can control when it sends a ping and make it shut
down between pings.

For competitive NXT events, it might be worthwhile for this group to
come up with a standard protocol that contest organisers could
require everyone's entries to adhere to if they wish to use the
sonar system.

This is a great idea except for one very important item: there is no such thing
as a broadcast message (ie: a message sent to everyone) using Bluetooth. So for
any such system to work, each robot has to know about every other robot, and
send individual messages to them all. In a competition environment (especially
something like FLL), that likely won't happen at all -- there are too many other
NXTs that you have to set up communication with. Even in a more structured and
less crowded environment, it isn't a trivial problem because of the limited
number of BT channels.

*Possibly* a better solution (I've not tried it, so who knows!) is to set up a
scheduling system: synchronize the clocks on the NXTs in the area with a set of
BT messages. Then each robot has its own pre-specified 1/5th of a second that it
can use the ultrasonic sensor. Depending on how accurate the clocks on different
NXTs are, once a minute or so you might need to resynchronize all the clocks.

--
  David Schilling

How about a single computer that was Bluetooth accessable.  The server could act
as a "lockable" resource that a NXT could acquire prior to doing the US
detection.  Then the NXTs don't need to know about each other, just the main
server (and it should be able to communicate with many other devices and not
bound by the NXT's limitations).  Perhaps Bluetooth communication hasn't got the
speed for this to work well though.

It sounds like the bigger problem is that currently no one knows how the shut
the US sensor completely off via software.

-Tim



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Ultrasonic sensor interactions
 
(...) This is a great idea except for one very important item: there is no such thing as a broadcast message (ie: a message sent to everyone) using Bluetooth. So for any such system to work, each robot has to know about every other robot, and send (...) (18 years ago, 21-May-06, to lugnet.robotics)

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