Really you won’t look back if you jump into the world of open source robotics using ROS. The main advantage is that you will not end up re-inventing the wheel. While ROS is used in many research laboratories and universities, you don’t have to be an academic to use it. The installation instructions of ROS are here and they are pretty straightforward. Once installed and set up, it is time to rock. The basic tutorials about the ROS filesystem,terminology, etc will do very good.
Archive for December, 2011
Robot Operating System (ROS) is a software framework for robot software development, providing operating system-like functionality on a heterogenous computer cluster. It can be called a meta operating system and its development continues primarily at Willow Garage. The latest version of ROS is ROS Electric Emys.
I built a small robot to detect an object using image processing techniques and when the object is found, it goes near to it and picks it up.
Arduino IDE is designed to program Arduino boards featuring an AVR microcontroller with an Arduino bootloader. But Do you know that the same Arduino IDE can be used to program other Atmega microcontrollers, even without a bootloader?.
Arduino Mega
One of the most important things you must have to get into microcontroller programming is a good programmer. AVR microcontrollers are programmed using its SPI port. So the simplest AVR programmers are the direct parallel port or serial port programmers, in which SPI protocol is bitbanged using the serial port or parallel port. But modern PCs and laptops does not have parallel ports and serial ports. They only have USB ports. So here comes the role of USB based programmers. One of the simplest USB based programmer is USBASP. It uses an Atmega 8 and a few passive components, and is well supported in Linux, Windows ans Mac. More details of the USBASP can be found here.
USBASP
Self Parking is a automatic parking system found in modern cars. It makes use of various sensors like cameras, sonars, infrared rangefinders etc. to gather information about the surroundings of a car and then use complex processing algorithms to park the car without the help of the driver. It is different from parking assistant systems which helps the actual human driver by providing information about the surroundings. Automatic parking is thus a marvel which we are going to see in almost all the cars of tomorrow. Automatic parking is less error prone than human and can make better utilization of scarce and tight parking spaces.
The self parking car
Rear view
