My new camera support

Built for canyon crawling and such its a robot with a 3-d depth camera and lidar for guidance. 12 inches of articulation and a top speed of around 7mph. The computers run Linux so remote DSLR and video control is possible. Looking for a decent FPV system so I can watch in real time as well.

Pretty cool! Let us know how it works out.

Awesome!

So, how do you get it up to Mars?

The booster guy is flaking on me Not sure but the rover will be ready. Check out the Zed at stereolabs.com. I know where they are doing the mars test in Utah. Might have to sneak it in there for some fun The simulations all work out. ROS has really fantastic tools. Robot Operating System. Its a really well supported public domain system. I'm already mapping with a lidar unit. I used stuff that already had a driver in ROS. Which isn't that difficult there aren't that many products. Until the past year or so Lidar has been over a grand now its 100 bucks 400 for one that already has the motors and all for spinning the unit. I'm fumbling around with slip rings and gear drives trying to get the cheap one to do 360 but looks like I'd been better off just to bite the bullet and go with the pre made unit. I'm going to enter it in the SparkFun autonomous bot contest next summer. And if it works as planned the electronics will be going on my mobility scooter so it can self drive as I shoot. I have to shoot sitting down and the scooter is really nice as it has a swivel seat. But getting that perfect angle can be trying. Moving the seat back to driving position moving then going back to looking through the viewfinder. With this I can tell it to move any direction while I'm looking through the viewfinder. And drive me back to the car while I review my shots. Find the nearest medical tent if my old ticker starts acting up and for us old folks knowing where the porta is located is golden I was talking to an old friend of mine the other night about the project. He's into AI and pretty good at it. We were talking about taking the self driving mobility scooter and adding in a neural network that could describe the scenery as you drove by. For a blind person it would be a godsend. It will have solar panels. I have a pair of deer feeder panels on the way. Not too big and not that expensive.

Griz

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #17733170
Awesome!

......

Agreed!

Exceptionally awesome.

Is your project closed or open sourced at this point? I've worked a fair bit with robotics of various forms over the years, but haven't really gotten to do much in the last while.

How do you find your data resolutions between the visual and LIDAR? Any time I've been on a project with access to both, we generally made use of all the data rather than switching between the two.

I really need to make room in the hobby budget to get back into this kind of thing. Really want to get back to work on a self deploying and adapting communications network.

Its all open source. There are some licensed parts. The SDK for the Zed camera for instance but for the most part its all open. Check out ROS Robot Operating System. If you do Linux you will be set. Its a pretty nice piece of software. Has drivers for most everything and the SLAM stuff is easy to implement. I was thinking I might should use everything all the time and maybe set up some kind of voting system to find out if something is going wrong. Not sure if that is used in robotics but I'm familar with the technique from computer clusters. I was into robotics back in the 80's. Then didn't really do anything with it or keep up. I had a Hero 2000 back then. The polaroid rangers had just come out. Actually I think TI made them. That was about the only ranging option for hobby use back then. Now its all different. The Zed camera shipped today so hopefully I'll have it by the end of the week. I have a Pulsed light v2 lidar unit and I'm about to order a RPLidar. Its complete does 360deg scans and all that. The Pulsed light unit is just the lidar unit you have to implement the scanning method. But using ROS I had it scanning the room in one night. Gmapping and Hector Slam are what I'm going to try and use. Both ROS packages. The Zed comes with a ROS driver package. So it will essentially be plug and play. Same with the RPLidar. And I found a driver for the motor controller I have so I won't even have to fool with that. ROS includes some decent simulation tools as well. Gazebo and Rviz. You can use Python or C for your code. I built a robotic telescope last year and that kinda got me back into it. Figured out I was more interested in making the servos and all work than I was taking pictures with it I bought parts from several vendors and built a custom rig for my DSLR. Breaks up into 10lb chunks so my old bod can get it outside. Then I saw a blurb about the Zed and that really got me interested. Found a site called JetsonHacks. He built a bot using a nvidia Jetson. I had 4 of them I was using as a cluster. So reading through his stuff I decided it was doable. I've built a lot of scratch build r/c cars in the past so putting the chassis together was easy enough. Its all Actobotics parts. Just need to solder the sensor board together and finish up the wiring on the motors and it will be ready for testing. Bolted down the two Jetsons today and reloaded them with a fresh copy of the OS Zed SDK and ROS. Then I just need to add in the Zed stuff and motor controller stuff to the pre built ROS image jetsonhacks has on github and I should be good to go. He's using a Create II base. Its a reconditioned roomba with the vacuum removed. They sell them for 200 bucks. I wanted something that would work outside or I probably would have gone that way myself. I think you'll find its a different exciting world in robotics these days. You've probably worked with a lot of this stuff but to someone who's last exposure was ultrasonic only its a huge change. The nvidia Jetson is a sweet embedded board. Pricey compared to the raspi and arduino but its so much more powerful. 5 ARM cores and a 192 core kepler GPU. 5inches square. Excellent software package from Nvidia. OpenCV Cuda CuDnn and a nice implementation of Ubuntu 14. Cross compiler profiler and debugger included as well as a custom edition of Eclipse IDE. Several channels of I2C CSI camera Touchscreen interface numerous serial ports and GPIO pins. USB3 Gig ethernet HDMI and JTag header.

Griz

Thought the Zed was going to be here today but something happened. Oh well I've waited a month another day won't kill me I did manage to get the software stack installed on both Jetsons and that is all working. Found a driver for the motor controller so I don't have to write that now. Didn't look too hard but lots of other stuff to do so it helps. Then I realized that my laptop isn't going to work for me to test with as it doesn't have a GPU. I can record however it will be clunky to do it that way but it won't be long before the bot can handle it. Hopefully I'll have some video before the end of the week.

Self deploying networks that sounds interesting. Is it something like a mesh network? Building networks is what I did most of my career. NASDAQ Mobil's ExNet and a few payment systems and ticketing systems I've just stuck my toe in the water on the lidar and depth camera so I have no idea what you mean. But you have depth info in every pixel from the Zed and it shouldn't be too much trouble to correlate the readings from the lidar and see if they match. I don't have a way to spin it 360deg yet. Just 180. Its on a turret so I scan 180 the flip it over and come back to get the total scan. Takes forever way to slow for real time use but at least I can get some maps out of it and see how it all works. I'm just now getting my head around ROS. There is a lot of it. I think 1700 modules and drivers available. There is a robot stack available for a Jetson on a roomba create 2 base with a kinect rgb-d camera. My plan is to replace the roomba motor driver with the one for my board and also do that with the rgb-d camera drivers and I should be close. It uses the same GPS and IMU that I have as well. We'll see.

Griz

The Zed camera finally arrived yesterday. Managed to get it laced up with ROS in a few hours and its been taking data ever since. Very cool tech. The wiring harness for the motors will be here today. About to go get some fuses and switches so I can get them working tonight. I have everything compiled into ROS to run the bot now just need to figure out the robot descriptor file and I can create the robot package.

Too much to read...just post a video of it in action!

BlakeC wrote in post #17737810
Too much to read...just post a video of it in action!

I wouldn't say that it's too much to read, but it would be nice if he hit the effin' <enter> key to separate the lined of text once in a while, wouldn't it?
Griz, that's called a Paragraph if you'd like to google it. ; )

PhotosGuy wrote in post #17737857
but it would be nice if he hit the effin' <enter> key to separate the lined of text once in a while, wouldn't it?
Griz, that's called a Paragraph if you'd like to google it. ; )

That's why I didnt read it! lol

Don't read it then. Doesn't bother me a bit. If all you are interested in is being entertained with a video its too deep for you anyway.

Griz

More pics when you can please! I work on very simple crawlers that do CCTV of sewer systems. Just 115VDC Motors and Remote P&T/Zoom/Focus/Iris cameras. This is some intersting stuff you have going on. What is your primary interest your imaging?