A Low-Cost Robot Positioning System for a First-Year Engineering Cornerstone Design Project

Abstract

Researchers in autonomous robotic design have leveraged a variety of technologies to simulate the Global Positioning System (GPS) on a smaller laboratory or commercial scale. In the interest of cost and accuracy, a system was developed for The Ohio State University Fundamentals of Engineering for Honors (FEH) Program's "Cornerstone" Design Project. The system utilizes high definition commercial web cameras to accurately simulate a GPS for the autonomous robots created by students.For the past 21 years The Ohio State University has provided a "Cornerstone" Design Project for first-year honors engineering students. In this course, teams of students compete in a robot design competition, designing a fully-autonomous robot around a given microcontroller and within specified size and budget. The robots are tasked with completing several objectives on an 18 square foot course within a two-minute time period.High definition Logitech C920 webcams were chosen for the project based on their commercial availability and operating resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels at a rate of 30 frames per second. Additionally, the cameras had a wide viewing angle which allowed them to be mounted six feet above each course. This provided sufficient coverage of each course and gave positional information to within a quarter of an inch and to within one degree. The system detected micro Quick Response (QR) codes, which were printed on three inch squares and mounted on each student's robot. The micro QR code data contained the name designation of each team.The cameras were controlled by a National Instruments (NI) LabVIEW application. Via user interface, three specific locations were selected on each course to calibrate the coordinate systems and to account for any rotation with respect to the camera. Based on the calibrated coordinate system, the detected location and orientation was transmitted over radio frequency to each robot. Information relating to the progress of each robot in completing course tasks was overlaid with this positional information onto a live video feed of each course. These feeds were displayed in sets of four in a global user interface for a large-scale, real-time, visual representation of each competition round for viewing by observers during final competition.The use of simulated GPS in the "Cornerstone" Design course gave the students the advantage of working with real world concepts. The system introduced students to designing programs that interact with external systems in real time. It also introduced students to navigation without physical interaction with obstacles. This added to the variety of tools available to students for navigation which facilitated discussion between students on best design strategies. It allowed students to not only design software that acted based on a variety of inputs, but to design software that seamlessly transitioned between them as well.

Developing and Improving a Multi-Element First-Year Engineering Cornerstone Autonomous Robotics Design Project

“…The RPS is a system of cameras that track student robots using QR codes and then wirelessly transmits that data to the robots using RF transmitters 9 . The system directly aids in many of the programs goals.…”

Work in Progress: Introduction of Failure Analysis to a First-year Robotics Course

“…• What is your plan to ensure success in the future? Additionally, while the robot had the option of navigating based upon data from the course's robot positioning system (RPS) [5] on most of the course, the area near the core extraction site was an RPS "dead zone," requiring the use of other navigational techniques to get to the core.…”

Modular System of Networked Embedded Components for a First-Year Engineering Cornerstone Design Project

“…Finally, the course computer also communicates with the Robot Positioning System (RPS). The RPS is responsible for tracking each student's robot and providing a coordinate system for those robots on the course 7 . The RPS also repeats the data sent to it from the course software to another networked computer that manages the bracket for the final public competition.…”