Agribot

Agribot IX

The team demoed the agribot today at TI. (Juan, Guang, and Alex above) Progress on the Android and iPhone apps is looking good as you can see from the screen shot below. The collision avoidance worked "OK" in this hallway - although the metal in the environment kept throwing off the e-compass. The GPS was a little bit off - but in the right general location.

Agribot VIII

Our Agribot team has been making good progress. In this video, Juan Wu(who has recently joined the team) is putting obstacles in front of the small scale robot as it tries to navigate to a specific GPS location. As you can see, there are still some improvements to be made, but the bot keeps going.

Once the team is satisfied with the performance of the small scale robot, the work will focus on the larger scale robot in an agricultural setting(row crop). One of the issues we're hoping won't be an issue in the field is e-compass error due to metal in the environment.

Agribot VII

We had two new members join the team today. Kelvin, who will be working on the server side of things - and Alejandro, who will be working on the Android version of the app. Our team is excited about the project and is focused on building a complete UI demonstration with maps and selectable navigation points within a few weeks. We're working on a DRV8432 boosterpack (with Masterspy) that should be capable of driving larger motors (14A peak) in parallel.

Agribot VI

Guang Zhou and Seungcheul Kim(from UTD) are holding a miniature version of the agribot they've built for testing their navigation software and iOS app. Their app enables any iOS device to control and share resources(such as GPS/maps/etc.) with the agribot via the CC3200's Wi-Fi connection.(making it a "phone drone") They are using the boosterpack developed by the Wi-Fi IoT team with integrated motor drivers to control the car and interface with a servo mounted ultrasonic sensor.

Once we complete development of their GPS + Ultrasonic navigation software for the agribot, we plan to launch a Kickstarter project(with some other contributing students) offering an agribot controller(with application) and a hardware kit (to build a full scale agribot). You can find our opensource navigation software project here: https://github.com/gzhou358/Agribot_v1.0

Agribot V

We've wired the rekam1 board into the agribot and test driven it around the drive way. As you can see, there are just four wires connected to the board: 6V, GND, pin 18 gated GND, and pin 19 gated GND. We ran the two gated grounds through a kill switch for safety. You'll notice the battery is at the opposite side of the bot to counterweight the bucket (which is 90 pounds).

We're running the bot backwards at low speeds since the bucket has a tendency to nick your heels if you're not careful ;) . We've ordered another linear actuator rated for 225 pounds at 12V. We plan to experiment with it at 6V, and if it's not powerful enough, go to a 12V system with a smaller bucket.

Agribot IV

We put this bucket on the agribot and tried moving it with a channel iron torque arm and linear actuator. Although the bucket is handy, it was too heavy for these little actuators (even with leverage). We decided to see if we could find someone to help us weld a smaller and lighter bucket. As we counter-weighted the bot, we realized these tires were too thin for outdoor applications - so we'll need to explore some fatter tires.

Linear actuators like the one above aren't cheap, so we're exploring homemade alternatives.

Agribot III

Here's an updated demo of obstacle collision avoidance using ultrasound. In this demo, the car is programmable via Wi-Fi using CC3200 and uses an ultrasonic transducer to sense and avoid running into objects in its programmed path.

In agricultural applications, the robot would use a programmable GPS-based path and would use the ultrasonic sensors to correct its path while navigating along rows of crops.