S15: Swarm Robots

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Grading Criteria

  • How well is Software & Hardware Design described?
  • How well can this report be used to reproduce this project?
  • Code Quality
  • Overall Report Quality:
    • Software Block Diagrams
    • Hardware Block Diagrams
      Schematic Quality
    • Quality of technical challenges and solutions adopted.

Swarm Robots

Abstract

Swarm robots deals with coordination of multiple robots. The collective behavior of the robot swarm emerges from interaction with each other and surroundings. All the Robots can communicate with each other. The position of each robot is determined and monitored by an overlooking camera. Large number of simple robots can perform complex tasks in a more efficient way than a single robot, giving robustness and flexibility to the group.

Objectives & Introduction

  • Initially all robots will go in search of the target, as and when the target is located, the bot which is near the target sends out a message about its present location to all other bots.
  • Overhead camera serves the purpose of determining the location of individual bots.
  • Once the message regarding the target position is received by other bots, each of them will move towards the target.

Team Members & Responsibilities

  • Team Member 1
    • Abhishek Gurudutt - OpenCV Image detection and OpenCV co-ordinate mapping.
  • Team Member 2
    • Bhargava Sreekantappa Gayithri - PID controller & PWM
  • Team Member 3
    • Chinmayi Divakara - Wireless communication and synchronization
  • Team Member 4
    • Praveen Prabhakaran - OpenCV co-ordinate mapping. OpenCV and SJone board communication.
  • Team Member 5
    • Tejeshwar Chandra Kamaal - PID controller & PWM

Schedule

Show a simple table or figures that show your scheduled as planned before you started working on the project. Then in another table column, write down the actual schedule so that readers can see the planned vs. actual goals. The point of the schedule is for readers to assess how to pace themselves if they are doing a similar project.

Week# Date Task Actual Status
1 4/14/2015 
  1) Hardware - Design of Motor Controller, 
     Robot assembly
  2) Software - OpenCV environment setup, 
     Basic video processing   

  1) Hardware, OpenCV setup - Completed  
     Problems Encountered -  Hardware Bug discovered in version 0.1 
     of motor controller circuit after testing.      
  2) Software - Problems during filtering video for certain colors.
Completed
2 4/21/2015 
  1) Communication between OpenCV to SJone board 
     using DB9 connector and UART3   
  2) PWM and Ultrasonic sensor drivers
  3) Object detection and mapping
  4) Wireless communication between two nodes

  1) Modification of RS232 header file to support windows 7 file API. 
     Was not able to communicate between OpenCV and SJone board using UART0
  2) Unable to receive the echo signal and was not able to use 
     ultrasonic sensor without interrupt.
  3) HSV values had to be detected to recognize particular color. 
     Had difficulties to find the HSV values for a color. 
     This was solved by writing a program to print the 
     HSV value of the color that is pointed in the video.
  4) Packet sending and recieving failure. System crash while 
     transmitting and recieving packets
Completed
3 4/28/2015 
 1) PID Controller Design
 2) Co-ordinates communication between nodes
    and boundary mapping
 3) Inter board communication and 
    communicating the Co-ordinates

  1) Point to point travel using PID control loop. Code written PID tuning in progress.
  2) Object detection completed. Co-ordinates mapping in progress.
  3) Inter board communication completed.
Completed
4 05/05/2015 
 1) Integration, testing and Bug fixing
- Scheduled

Parts List & Cost

Part Description Cost
1

Robot chassis and motors = $66.7

2

Wireless camera = $26.21

3

Ultrasonic sensor = $17.98

4

Lipo Batteries and charger = $43.28

5

H bridge IC - L293d = $10.91

6

Connectors, cables etc = $45

7

Antennas for wireless module = $15

Design & Implementation

The design section can go over your hardware and software design. Organize this section using sub-sections that go over your design and implementation.

Hardware Design

Discuss your hardware design here. Show detailed schematics, and the interface here.

Hardware Interface

In this section, you can describe how your hardware communicates, such as which BUSes used. You can discuss your driver implementation here, such that the Software Design section is isolated to talk about high level workings rather than inner working of your project.

Software Design

Show your software design. For example, if you are designing an MP3 Player, show the tasks that you are using, and what they are doing at a high level. Do not show the details of the code. For example, do not show exact code, but you may show psuedocode and fragments of code. Keep in mind that you are showing DESIGN of your software, not the inner workings of it.

  • Detecting and locating robot - This is achieved with the help of an overhead wireless camera. Camera access and detection of robot is implemented on a computer with the help of openCV library. Each robot will be updated with its present location.
    • Detection of robot : Each robot is of a different color. This will help in differentiating the robots from one another. Images from the camera are captured every 30 millisecond, these images obtained will be in RGB format which is converted to HSV format. The converted image is then filtered. Hue(H), Saturation(S) and Value(V) are different for different color, hence the image can be filtered by defining the range for each color. The filtered image is then processed to remove noise.
    • Location of robot : Each filtered image contains only one object, the outline of the object is found out and checked if the area is more than threshold. If the area is less than the threshold, then it is discarded as noise. The spatial coordinates of the outlined image is found out which gives the position of the robot.
    • Communicating locations of robots between OpenCV and Main SJone board : Co-ordinates of each robot is sent using using DB9 connector and UART3(SJone board). Each co-ordinate is sent with a header and Robot ID.
    • SJone master board, receives the Robot Id and Co-ordinates and transmits the co-ordinates to the respective bots. The bots keep track of its location and the direction of its movement is determined.

Implementation

This section includes implementation, but again, not the details, just the high level. For example, you can list the steps it takes to communicate over a sensor, or the steps needed to write a page of memory onto SPI Flash. You can include sub-sections for each of your component implementation.

Testing & Technical Challenges

Describe the challenges of your project. What advise would you give yourself or someone else if your project can be started from scratch again? Make a smooth transition to testing section and described what it took to test your project.

Include sub-sections that list out a problem and solution, such as:

My Issue #1

Discuss the issue and resolution.

Conclusion

Conclude your project here. You can recap your testing and problems. You should address the "so what" part here to indicate what you ultimately learnt from this project. How has this project increased your knowledge?

Project Video

Upload a video of your project and post the link here.

Project Source Code

References

Acknowledgement

Any acknowledgement that you may wish to provide can be included here.

References Used

List any references used in project.

Appendix

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