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History of the project

A project log for Robot for telepresence and VR experiments

This is a robot platform with stereo cameras and omniwheel drive. It can be connected to HMD (e.g., google cardboad, ocolus rift, ...)

btomBTom 05/29/2016 at 09:410 Comments

First we build this robot to a competition called "Magyarok a Marson". In this competition every year there is a new challenge.

We planed this robot for multiple use, not only for this competition. We adapted our ideas to the requirement of the competition. Like the size limit, weight limit, and form (column chassis)

Our plans was bigger than the time, and budget we can use to build the robot, because we ran into lots of problems to solve. For the competition we can't finish the head movement part, so we used a fixed cameras, but everything else worked fine.

On the competition we faced another problem, what we can't solve there. The robot uses the Raspberry Pi 3 on-board WIFI adapter. It's a good adapter, if there isn't another 30+ wifi device near it. We tried to use 5Ghz wifi USB sticks what we bought hours before the competition, but couldn't get it work on the Pi in time. (the competition was at the weekend, so every big shop was closed) We got some points on the competition, but from an outsider perspective our robot worked poorly.

After the competition we learned the conclusions. We will use a WIFI Acces Point on the robot itself. In the past, we used unifi ubiquiti access points in similar situations, and it worked well.

Before the competition the robot worked well in our test, we never think about the connection. We were a bit sad because we couldn't present a robot in it's full glory, but we learnt a lot from building the robot.

We like going to competitions like this, for the learning. Every time we face new problems, we learn something from it. On the upcoming post I will summarize the topic, and the greatest challenges what we were faced while we building/developing this robot.

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