Credits

• Peterbjornx: Hardware, (most) software
• Jurjen: Helping out with the video link, offering his laptop to be used in this project

Goal

The goal for this project is to have a nice and extensible robot platform, which can be used for future projects.

Main Features

• Differential steering
• Rotatable camera
• 4*16 Alphanumerical LCD (Not in current version)
• Arduino based HW control
• Controlled from a Linux powered laptop

Parts

• Roomba without mainboard
• Arduino Uno (At the moment just provides a serial motor and LCD interface)
• Laptop
• 2 Servo's for camera rotation
• USB webcam with illumination
• 4x16 Alphanumerical LCD (Not in current version)
• Cordless drill battery
• Dual h-bridge motor driver:
  • 4 IRF530 FET's
  • 4 IRF9530 FET's
  • 4 BC547 BJT's
  • 4 BC557 BJT's
  • 8 100 Ohm resistors
  • 8 10k resistors
  • 4 33k resistors
  • 4 47k resistors
  • 8 1N4001 diodes
• Temporarily: control PC
  • Linux based workstation
  • USB Joystick ( preferrably with dpad ON the main stick)

Todo list

• Get feedback from gearbox speed sensors
• Add kinect

Schematic

The schematic i based the motor driver on (i only used different transistors and FET's): I have hardwired the switches on that schematic to two wires per H-Bridge [1]

The Arduino and webcam are linked to the onboard laptop via USB. The laptop is controlled over a raw TCP link and the video feed is done via gstreamer.

Code

Arduino source: [2]

Java source: [3]

You also need http://sourceforge.net/projects/javajoystick/ for the java control example

The message format for the serial/TCP link is c [motor 1] [motor 2] [servo 1] [servo 2] (Note: there has to be a trailing space) Motor values :

Stop-Fast 
128-255 : Forward
  0-127 : Reverse
That means 128 = 0 = stop

ser2net server commandline: (On robot laptop)

ser2net -d -C 1337:raw:0:/dev/ttyACM0 

gstreamer server commandline: (On robot laptop)

gst-launch v4l2src ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=640,height=480,framerate=\(fraction\)5/1 ! ffmpegcolorspace \
! jpegenc ! multipartmux ! tcpserversink host=[your robot laptop's IP] port=5000

gstreamer client commandline: (On video viewing PC)

gst-launch-0.10 tcpclientsrc host=[your robot laptop's IP] port=5000 ! multipartdemux ! jpegdec ! autovideosink

Pictures

Before the laptop was added to the robot:

Youtube Video: