Find the wall outlet June 2007

Submitted by admin on Mon, 2010-11-15 10:22

Hardware

A contest was held which had the objective of the robot finding an electrical outlet on the wall in the front of the room as accurately as possible, and with the optional objective of actually plugging in a real plug. There were 4 entrants, however only three ran since Martin accidently smoked his processor just before the contest. Oh well, these things happen ;-)

Each contestant then gave a presentation on how they had approached the contest. Some interesting aspects follow:

Jim built his own sensing device to find the outlet. It consisted of a laser and 3 light sensors mounted in an empty 35mm film canister which was mounted on two RC servos so that it could rotate 360 degrees. The rules allowed a beacon at the outlet, and Jim put together a passive reflective beacon using corner reflector type auto reflectors from Pep Boys and a piece of black velvet in between reflectors. His robot would scan the room until it found the outlet, then approach the outlet making occasional steering corrections and usually lowered a pointer right onto the outlet. As usual, he did all this with a Basic Stamp with 26 bytes of RAM.

Steve used a camera from a broken camcorder which has autofocus and produces very high quality images. He combined this with the image recognition and navigation software from the Evolution Robotics ER-1 robot to make a very accurate approach to the outlet. So accurate that a carefully positioned plug would slide right in.

Alex relocated Rocky’s webcam from the top of the robot to just above wall socket level. He used Compass , sonar and deadreckoning to search along the wall. Steven Gentner’s RoboRealm (Roborealm.com) software was used to detect the outlet and to provide navigation data to approach it.

Jim Ubersetzig and his robot "T".

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