Autonomous Rover Part 6: Troubleshooting

Ordered a power module (PM) from Amazon for the Ardupilot Mega and received it a couple weeks ago. Below is a picture of the PM.

Autonomous Rover Part 5: Using the ArduPilot Mega(APM) and GPS

     I have finally received the ArduPilot Mega 2.6(APM) and GPS from 3DRobotics. It took them a pretty long time to ship out to me. I originally had also ordered sonar sensors to place on the rover to avoid obstacles but they are out of stock and I think they have been discontinued from 3DR. I guess the main reason why the APM took so long for it to come was because of the backordered sonar sensors. I just canceled the ordering of the sonar sensors and then the APM and GPS was finally shipped.

Autonomous Rover Part 4: Finishing Up the Build and Some Demonstration

              

     So I have gotten the MINDS-i Robot up and running. The video above is a quick simple video of the Rover driving on some grass and uphills. It seems to be a very sturdy frame. There were times where I accidentally flipped the rover over upside down when trying to drive up something very steep where there was a stop or something to go over at the end. But the frame stills holds up. 

Autonomous Rover Part 3: Building the Frame

                

   In the video above I go over the beginning of building the frame of the rover that we are going to use. As mentioned before, we're going with the leaf spring version of this kit to be able to provide as much space as possible for the ArduPilot and the other components to make this rover autonomous. 

  This is one of my first videos so I'm not really quite good at recording and talking but I will do better in future videos. 

Autonomous Rover Part 2: The MINDS-i 4X4 3-in-1 Robot and the FlySky FS-T6 Transmitter

                

The video above is just a quick overview of the parts that came with the MINDS-i 4X4 3-in-1 robot kit.

Design:

 The MINDS-i Robot has finally arrived here at Boca Bearings. It's a fairly large package with many pieces. The package is shown below.

 The robot has three different build options. The build options are seen on the front cover of the manual. The design that we are going to go with is the one shown below.

Autonomous Rover Part 1: Project Proposal

Purpose/Goal:

The purpose of this project is how to learn to create an autonomous land vehicle that can be programmed with waypoints for destinations to travel to. I will learn how to also add ultrasonic sensors to the rover to avoid crashing into any obstacles on the way to its waypoints. This project will also help me learn more about RC cars such as the motors and the ECS. I have never had experience working with any type of RC cars and their components. I will learn things such as the frame of the RC car as well as its suspension. I could probably learn how to change certain parts of the RC car to get different results. I’m into cars and learning on working on cars so this project will help me learn more on a smaller scale. I will also learn how steering works. Then maybe I can apply this concept to a future project such as go kart. I will also learn how to use a multi-channel transmitter to control the RC car when it’s not in autonomous mode.

Initial Design Concept:

For the design of the Rover I will be using a platform already designed by MINDS-I. The model in particular will be the 3-in-1 4X4 Robot as seen below.