MacFeegle Prime, Minimal Viable Product, To Be Decided…

Time’s pressing and though I started with lofty goals I need to set a minimum that I’ll be happy with that are acheivable, in software engineering (and probably other fields) we refer to this as the minimum viable product.

The Challenges

There are seven challenges in PiWars, one is autonomous only, a few are optionally autonomous for extra points and some are remote control suggested but you can do them autonomously for bragging rights. The challenges are as follows:

• Autonomous Only
  • Lava Palaver – Line Following
• Remote Control/Autonomous Optional
  • Eco Disaster – Barrel Sorting
  • Escape Route – a blind maze
  • Minesweeper – find and disarm red squares
• Remote Control
  • Pi Noon – Robot jousting!
  • Zombie Apocolypse – shooting gallery
  • Temple of Doom – Obstacle course!

Required Sensors

This robot will be powered by a Stereo Pi so will have the capability for conputer vision, if I’ll be in a position to learn how to do that is a different matter, so what are the simplest sensors I can use to solve these problems?

Line Following

The simplest way for this is an array of light sensors pointing down along the front bumper. The line will be brighter so you can sense how far from centre you are and change your steering accordingly. I’ve a load of IR distance sensors from the ill fated version one of the shooting gallery that I can press in to play.

Blind Maze

For this I’ll need a bunch of distance sensors arrayed around the robot, I have used ultrasonic sensors in the past but they’re physically quite large and the other competitors mentioned a better option. The VL53L0X is a LIDAR sensor that runs over i2c, it can run in continuous mode and you can request a reading on the fly. These are physically smaller will be easier to have more arrayed around the robot they do have a few downsides.

First off, all of these have the same i2c address by default so you have to either change the address on boot up, which requires a wire per sensor, or use an i2c multiplexor, which requires a few wires per sensor. I heard from one of my fellow competitors that the former was ropey at best when they’ve tried it in the past so multiplexor it is!

The other downside is that the performance of these sensors depends a great deal on the surface they’re reflecting from, white is the best for reflectance and black the worst, guess which colour the walls are at PiWars?

In finding links for this post I just spotted these ultrasonic rangefinders which are much smaller, pricy but they’d certainly do the job.

Mine Sweeper

The way this challenge works is that the robot is placed on a 4×4 grid that is lit up from underneath. One of the squares will be lit up red and if the robot moves to and stands on it, it’ll be defused. For a pure brute force method of doing this you can use a colour sensor facing down on the bumper. You’d have the robot bimble around at random, much like the early Roomba’s, and when it detects red it can stop until the colour changes.

It’s not efficient, but it could work. I’m not sure if the extra points for doing it autonomously would be more fruitful than getting more mines by driving manually. I’ve seen someone post a proof of concept for doing this using computer vision so for this one I’ll go with manual with computer vision being the stretch goal.

Remote Control

The bulk of the challenges will be done manually, so we’re going to need a suitable controller. Ideally I’d have a full waldo controller and VR headset as per my aspiration but I need to be more realistic. As a very basic method of control I have an xbox controller rigged up to a Raspberry Pi with a display. It’ll connect via a wifi hotspot, likely my phone, and issue commands over TCP. With the analogue sticks of the Xbox controller I’ll be able to control the movement with one stick and control the head (cameras) with the other, much like in a first person shooter. If arm control using the sticks proves too tricky to control this way I can just preprogram a few positions so it can put hand in front of the bot, press another to close the hand, another to raise is slightly… It’d be all I need for the barrel challenge but wouldn’t be using the arms to the fullest.

Conclusion

We have a plan, or at least the idea of a plan… Having a smaller set of more constrained targets is a good focus, now I just need to get over this damn lurgy and get some energy back!