2020FallTeam1
Team Members
- Electrical Engineers
- Benjamin Crawford
- Heather Huntley
- Joshua Orozco
- Mechanical Engineers
- Peggy Tran
Project Overview
Initially the goal of our project was to design an autonomous vehicle that would utilize DonkeyAI framework, open CV, and sensors to detect and gather tennis balls in one area to facilitate collecting them after each set. Due to COVID-19, the scope of our project was pivoted to create a ROS package that enables the RoboCar to use images taken through its external camera to be processed through a mask and proportional-integral-derivative tuning in order to read the yellow lines on the external track and drive autonomously; the RoboCar uses RGB sensors to read the yellow lines and compute a centroidal value that it follows.
Hardware
Mechanical Design
- Camera Mount
- Base Plate
This base plate was printed on .25 inch acrylic and was used to hold all electrical components of the RoboCar.
Electronic Components
- Jetson Nano Developer Kit
- Adafruit PCA9685
- 16bit PWM controller
- USB webcam
- High power LEDs
- 11.1V 3S LiPo battery
- Battery voltage sensor
- 433MHz remote relay
- 12V-5V DC-DC voltage converter
The car our team used is built around a Traxxas Ford Fiesta chassis containing a DC motor, electronic speed controller and servo motor. The following diagram shows how all of the electronics are wired.
Electronic Wiring Schematic
Software
We set up a GitHub repository where the code used by the vehicle is stored. The repository contains an ROS package which is designed to be used with our car. The following diagram displays the overall structure of the out ROS package, Autonomous_ROS_Racer.
Milestones
DonkeyCar
Using the donkeycar framework and the UCSD GPU cluster to speed up the behavioral modeling process we were able to do five autonomous laps on an outdoor track. As you can see in the video below:
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ROS Package
With the ROS package that we developed we completed five laps (with a little help) on the track in the Warren tents. Here is a video of that:
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Future Suggestions
For software focused members, it's important to brush up on any python skills during the former half of the quarter to prepare for the latter half when you are coding your own RoboCar. For hardware focused members, they should brush up on relevant tolerance standards in order to minimize the amount of material they use when designing the baseplate and cam mount. For all members, they should retain as much as they can on ROS ignite and collaborate on the topics/concepts in order to consolidate their knowledge.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Professors Jack Silberman and Mauricio de Oliveira for their help throughout the quarter and consistent work in keeping the course engaging and relevant throughout the difficulties imposed by the COVID pandemic. We would also like to recognize the hard work put in by the TA's Haoru and Leeor.