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Is there a small testing car kit in planning with sensors etc. for testing the learned in live situations? I know i could build it myself or try using some prebuilt ones, but it would be nicer using a tailor-made which has the focus on the right things according to the lessons in this course. If not, a simulated environment would be nice, too. We could upload our programmed car for testing, just like a simulated Darpa Grand Challenge ;) Two links taken from the last A.I. Course which could be used to implement and test some filters: |
This is a cheap and well documented project - Neural network controlled self-driving (RC) car, inspired by ML-class.Link to authors blog post with construction details, schematics and code can be found here: How David Singleton built a neural network controlled self-driving (RC) car! Link to his G+ post and comments The source code is open source and available on github. Video of car in action: Youtube link
This is a great idea. It is much more fun to build something that actually moves then a simulation. The beauty of this approach is that most people already own smartphones and computers. You just need the bot. It is much more fun to develop on a pc then embedded hardware. Instead of a cheap radio controlled car, you could also use an Arduino based bot or a lego mindstorms based bot. The computer could control a Mindstorm's bot by Bluetooth or the Arduino bot by whatever communications you add (like bluetooth or wi-fi). Has anyone done video streaming from an iPhone to a Mac? Or is there a cheap Android phone that would be good for this that can be purchased without a phone plan? I wonder with a pi rasperry the remote computer should be necessary anymore, even though it requires 3.5 Watt of power. I mean for the processing... if 700 Mhz ARM is enough, it could be done right on the car. |
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I like the idea of a simulated Grand Challenge/competition. Maybe using ROS? Update: |
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Another vote for ROS (Robot Operating System) as a software basis :) It is a software framework, which supports a lot of hardware platforms (also a lot of cameras, laser scanners and so on) and has a lot of things already implemented. Everything is open source and the community is very friendly. |
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I think a simulated environment would be the best way to go. It avoids having to buy expensive hardware (or any hardware at all) and would be easy to test. I think for Junior, the Stanford team built software that could run on the car or that could run in a simulation. Check out a maze simulation for Junior. Or maybe we should all just pitch in $10 to start our own autonomous vehicle. Oh yes, a robot simulator would be good. After having done the particle filter for the AI class, I've thought about that, that would make a good side project (and then real life kicked in, of course). Perhaps we should start a robot simulator toolkit project? AWESOME video! Unfortunately, I assume that software is not open source? Great to see the path planner, mapping, and car controller working... |
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I'm planning on building a small car using the Arduino microcontroller. There's some good tutorials out there on creating robots with the Arduino. I already had the Arduino, but had to get everything else (soldering gun, solder, breadboard, etc). It came out to about $60.00. There's also LEGO Mindstorms, which is really fun. I built a line following robot with those in High School. Probably a bit more expensive, though. I'd be interested in seeing if there was some sort of simulated environment as well! |
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Another simulator that could be used is MORSE. It is an open robotics simulator based on Blender Game Engine. And you can use different middleware as ROS and YARP to control the robot in the simulator. |
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http://www.finchrobot.com/ is a new item from Carnegie Mellon. Here was the notice on the Alice mailing list from one of the developers. Tom Lauwers tlauwers@finchrobot.com: With Finch Dreams you can write programs that control the Finch and We currently have a stable version working under Windows, and will |
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I have been independently working on an extremely amateur robotics project at home. I have come to the conclusion that for the complete newbie, a complete kit is the only way to start. I would suggest the polulu for that purpose. I have bought an Arduino, and I'm attempting to construct a robot based on this using the Magician chassis and a couple of range-finders. It turns out, I suck at construction :). I will be buying some meccano soon to get around that particular problem :) |
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After finishing ai-class last fall I've been searching for a while to find a cool robot development platform. I came across four interesting products... unfortunately none of them have an Ackermann steering geometry like a car, but they seem well-suited for home experiments related to this class. Maybe you want to have a look:
Update: Here is an interesting slide set from a Microsoft programmer regarding a "Virtual Darpa Grand Challenge" |
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There is an robotics development platform for a small self-driving car out there, just found it here. But it is incredible expensive. Maybe it could be our platform if it was cheaper. What if it were open source? What if it were built by our community? What if it were cheaper? Check this topic out: http://www.udacity-forums.com/cs373/questions/9566/open-source-robotics-kit These are the kind of cool things that I was hoping to find in this forum |
