[Dprglist] Build your own self driving car meetup yesterday

[deltagraph at aol.com]

Hello Kumar cc DPRG list

Nice to meet you at the Donkey Car meeting in Plano at Improving Wednesday.
If you go to dprg.org website you will find mailing list archives under Historical tab.
Thanks for your link to indoor positioning system. I see they use ultrasonic beacons, interesting.
The tracking system I mentioned uses VIVE  VR system. 
In this case the robot would need to operate in the envelope covered by the line laser sweeping beacons.The system is about $500 to including VR headset, two beacons  and two hand controllers.  A limitation of the system is the robot would need to be visible to the beacons, e.g. operating on the floor of a given room. It might be possible to purchase a single beacon or two for something like $135 each, and use it with ones own hardware OR use a pre-existing hand controller with the complete system OR optional $100 tracker which is smaller than a hand controller. 

https://hackaday.com/2016/08/23/htc-vive-gives-autonomous-robots-direction/

I have played with the VIVE system a bit and used it with Processing environment to render 3D scenes for the VR headset. In doing so, also have access to hand controller position data, but have not placed a controller on a robot or done any testing of accuracy of the system, but I would think the information is out there on the net.

One neat feature of the VIVE trackers/hand-controllers and headset is the position and orientation of the sensor is available. Also I should mention that each device includes multiple beacon sensors to make the system more robust.
Also, thanks on the simulator link. I will have to look at that. My Processing line following simulations do not include physics. There is some support for 3D physics in Processing.
Thanks for link on GoPiGo also. Like my stepper robot platform it has the advantage of being able to operate in a small environment and moving much more slowly than RC car.  I see robot has encoders, good. For more accurate turning, very narrow contact surface would be more desirable - of course just depends on what you are trying to do. 

Ron Grant
 
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Thalanayar Muthukumar <tnkumar at gmail.com>
To: dprglist <dprglist at lists.dprg.org>; deltagraph <deltagraph at aol.com>
Sent: Thu, Jan 17, 2019 7:35 am
Subject: Re: Build your own self driving car meetup yesterday

Oops ... Adding the link to indoor gps
https://www.amazon.com/Marvelmind-Precise-2cm-Indoor-Starter/dp/B075WTJMTJ

On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 7:33 AM Thalanayar Muthukumar <tnkumar at gmail.com> wrote:

It was great to be at the meetup yesterday and get to see that there are so many people engaged in this in our area.
Ron - Thanks for explaining many of the things you had worked on.
At this point of time, - I have a GoPiGo robot car that is functional- I am interested to get Donkey car software running on this
Are there archives of the DPRG mailing list that can be viewed?Carl - The donkey car slack group seems very active.
One robotic simulation software V-Rep (Free) that I came across a few months ago seems very rich for robotics.
It does have a learning curve, but thought it may be of interest to this group.Examples of what can be accomplished can be seen here  http://www.coppeliarobotics.com/videos.html
Ron - This is a link to the indoor GPS with +/- 2 cm that I was talking about
Regards.- Kumar


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.dprg.org/pipermail/dprglist-dprg.org/attachments/20190118/c263002b/attachment.html>