Robot (Machine) Remote Vision

If the Wi-Fi robots goes out of line of sight you need an on-board view to keep driving. With a laptop on-board the robot remote vision capabilities can be achieved fairly easily with a standard webcam connected to the laptop and some free software. This part of the system is independent of the control system of the robot which keeps things simple.

I experimented with a number of webcam web server type applications to allow the output of the bot's camera to be displayed on the fixed PC. The best free one I could find is machine vision system RoboRealm vision software which is specifically designed for robotic type applications. The software is installed on the mobile PC where it can accept the output from the bot's webcam and broadcast it using its built-in web server. The output can be read on any networked PC using a standard web browser.

This allows you to drive the robot with the joystick on the fixed PC whilst watching the bot's webcam video broadcast. This is quite tricky – mainly because of the limited field of vision of the typical web camera, but also crucially due to the time lag in the broadcast video! I found that the RoboRealm software is much better in this regard than many other webcam web server applications, however there is still a delay of about a second between the real motion of the robot and the corresponding movement in the received webcam video. Any more than this and control of the robot becomes very tricky.

 

Here is a movie clip from the Bot's eye-view, it's about 6Mb in size - Robot's Eye View to give an idea what the output can be like.

 

 

A further point to note is the bandwidth required by the video output is much higher than that required by the UDP comms used to control the robot. The effect of this is that you are likely to loose video output before you loose control of the robot on the network which gives some opportunity for reversing back into video range!

 

 

Software, Plans, Diagrams and Documents.....

 

I've put together a package of information covering the driver software, bot wiring diagrams, flash programs, technical drawings and user guides and notes which you will be interested in if you are interested in having a go at building the Wi-Fi bot or even in building something similar.

 

Most of this is free (see below) however a non time limited version of the Wi-Fi Bot Driver software and the detailed engineering drawings and materials and components list are only available with the full PAID-FOR plans set. This is available from the plan order pages here.

 

So what's in the information package?

 

 

There's quite a lot of information here, the software User Guide and the general guidance notes will help to get familiar with things initially.

 

The demo version of the Bot_Sender drive software is fully functional but will stop running after about 5 minutes. This will be long enough to check its functions and confirm that it runs on your system. To obtain the non time limited version and the detailed drawing set for the bot you need to buy the Full Access Password Set available from the plan order pages here. All the plans are also available on CDROM from the plans page.

 

Happy building!

 

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