Schlagwort: autonomous

  • Autonomous drones (only slightly flammable)

    Autonomous drones (only slightly flammable)

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    I had an email a little while ago, which opened: “I don’t know if you remember me, but…”

    As it happens, I remembered Andy Baker very well, in large part because an indoor autonomous drone demo he ran at a Raspberry Pi birthday party a couple of years ago ACTUALLY CAUGHT FIRE. Here’s a refresher.

    Raspberry Pi Party Autonomous drone demo + fire

    At the Raspberry Pi IV party and there is a great demo of an Autonomous drone which is very impressive with only using a Pi. However it caught on fire. But i believe it does actually work.

    We’ve been very careful since then to make sure that speakers are always accompanied by a fire extinguisher.

    I love stories like Andy’s. He started working with the Raspberry Pi shortly after our first release in 2012, and had absolutely no experience with drones or programming them; there’s nothing more interesting than watching someone go from a standing start to something really impressive. It’s been a couple of years since we were last in touch, but Andy mailed me last week to let me know he’s just completed his piDrone project, after years of development. I thought you’d like to hear about it too. Over to Andy!

    Building an autonomous drone from scratch

    I suffer from “terminal boredom syndrome”; I always need a challenging hobby to keep me sane. In 2012, the Raspberry Pi was launched just as my previous hobby had come to an end. After six months of playing (including a Raspberry Pi version of a BBC Micro Turtle robot I did at school 30+ years ago), I was looking for something really challenging. DIY drones were emerging, so I set out making one with a Raspberry Pi and Python, from absolute ignorance but loads of motivation.  Six years later, with only one fire (at the Raspberry Pi 4th Birthday Party, no less!), the job is done.

    Here’s smaller Zoë, larger Hermione and their remote-controller, Ivy:

    Zoë (as in “Ball”), the smallest drone, is based on a Pi ZeroW, supporting preset- and manual-flight controls. Hermione (as in “Granger”) is a Pi3 drone, supporting the above along with GPS and obstacle-avoidance.

    Penelope (as in “Pitstop”), not shown above, is a B3+ with mix of the two above.

    Development history

    It probably took four years(!) to get the drone to simply hover stably for more than a few seconds. For example, the accelerometer (IMU) tells gravity and acceleration in 3D; and from sum math(s), angles, speed and distance. But IMU output is very noisy. It drifts with temperature, and because gravity is huge compared to the propeller changes, it doesn’t take long before the calculated speed and distance values drift significantly. It took a lot of time, experimentation and guesswork to get accelerometer, gyrometer, ground-facing LiDAR and a Raspberry Pi camera to work together to get a stable hover for minutes rather than seconds. And during that experimentation, there were plenty of crashes: replacement parts were needed many many times! However, with a sixty-second stable hover finally working, adding cool features like GPS tracking, object avoidance and human control were trivial in comparison.

    GNSS waypoint tracked successfully!

    See http://blog.pistuffing.co.uk/whoohoo/

    Obstruction avoidance test 2 – PASSED!!!!!

    Details at http://pidrone.io/posts/obstruction-avoidance-test-2-passed/

    Human control (iPhone)

    See http://pidrone.io/posts/human-i-am-human/

    In passing, I’m a co-founder and assistant at the Cotswold Raspberry Jam (cotswoldjam.org). I’m hoping to take Zoë to the next event on September 15th – tickets are free – and there’s so much more learn, interact and play with beyond the piDrone.

    Finally, a few years ago, my goal became getting the piDrone exploring a maze: all but minor tweaks are now in places. Sadly, piDrone battery power for exploring a large maze currently doesn’t exist. Perhaps my next project will be designing a nuclear-fusion battery pack?  Deuterium oxide (heavy water) is surprisingly cheap, it seems…

    More resources

    If you want to learn more, there’s years of development on Andy’s blog at http://pidrone.io, and he’s made considerable documentation available at GitHub if you want to explore things further after this blog post. Thanks Andy!

    Website: LINK

  • UK soldiers design Raspberry Pi bomb disposal robot

    UK soldiers design Raspberry Pi bomb disposal robot

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Three soldiers in the British Army have used a Raspberry Pi to build an autonomous robot, as part of their Foreman of Signals course.

    Meet The Soldiers Revolutionising Bomb Disposal

    Three soldiers from Blandford Camp have successfully designed and built an autonomous robot as part of their Foreman of Signals Course at the Dorset Garrison.

    Autonomous robots

    Forces Radio BFBS carried a story last week about Staff Sergeant Jolley, Sergeant Rana, and Sergeant Paddon, also known as the “Project ROVER” team. As part of their Foreman of Signals training, their task was to design an autonomous robot that can move between two specified points, take a temperature reading, and transmit the information to a remote computer. The team comments that, while semi-autonomous robots have been used as far back as 9/11 for tasks like finding people trapped under rubble, nothing like their robot and on a similar scale currently exists within the British Army.

    The ROVER buggy

    Their build is named ROVER, which stands for Remote Obstacle aVoiding Environment Robot. It’s a buggy that moves on caterpillar tracks, and it’s tethered; we wonder whether that might be because it doesn’t currently have an on-board power supply. A demo shows the robot moving forward, then changing its path when it encounters an obstacle. The team is using RealVNC‘s remote access software to allow ROVER to send data back to another computer.

    Applications for ROVER

    Dave Ball, Senior Lecturer in charge of the Foreman of Signals course, comments that the project is “a fantastic opportunity for [the team] to, even only halfway through the course, showcase some of the stuff they’ve learnt and produce something that’s really quite exciting.” The Project ROVER team explains that the possibilities for autonomous robots like this one are extensive: they include mine clearance, bomb disposal, and search-and-rescue campaigns. They point out that existing semi-autonomous hardware is not as easy to program as their build. In contrast, they say, “with the invention of the Raspberry Pi, this has allowed three very inexperienced individuals to program a robot very capable of doing these things.”

    We make Raspberry Pi computers because we want building things with technology to be as accessible as possible. So it’s great to see a project like this, made by people who aren’t techy and don’t have a lot of computing experience, but who want to solve a problem and see that the Pi is an affordable and powerful tool that can help.

    Website: LINK

  • BitBarista: a fully autonomous corporation

    BitBarista: a fully autonomous corporation

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    To some people, the idea of a fully autonomous corporation might seem like the beginning of the end. However, while the BitBarista coffee machine prototype can indeed run itself without any human interference, it also teaches a lesson about ethical responsibility and the value of quality.

    BitBarista

    Bitcoin coffee machine that engages coffee drinkers in the value chain

    Autonomous corporations

    If you’ve played Paperclips, you get it. And in case you haven’t played Paperclips, I will only say this: give a robot one job and full control to complete the task, and things may turn in a very unexpected direction. Or, in the case of Rick and Morty, they end in emotional breakdown.

    BitBarista

    While the fully autonomous BitBarista resides primarily on the drawing board, the team at the University of Edinburgh’s Center for Design Informatics have built a proof-of-concept using a Raspberry Pi and a Delonghi coffee maker.

    BitBarista fully autonomous coffee machine using Raspberry Pi

    Recently described by the BBC as ‘a coffee machine with a life of its own, dispensing coffee to punters with an ethical preference’, BitBarista works in conjunction with customers to source coffee and complete maintenance tasks in exchange for BitCoin payments. Customers pay for their coffee in BitCoin, and when BitBarista needs maintenance such as cleaning, water replenishment, or restocking, it can pay the same customers for completing those tasks.

    BitBarista fully autonomous coffee machine using Raspberry Pi

    Moreover, customers choose which coffee beans the machine purchases based on quality, price, environmental impact, and social responsibility. BitBarista also collects and displays data on the most common bean choices.

    BitBarista fully autonomous coffee machine using Raspberry Pi

    So not only is BitBarista a study into the concept of full autonomy, it’s also a means of data collection about the societal preference of cost compared to social and environmental responsibility.

    For more information on BitBarista, visit the Design Informatics and PETRAS websites.

    Home-made autonomy

    Many people already have store-bought autonomous technology within their homes, such as the Roomba vacuum cleaner or the Nest Smart Thermostat. And within the maker community, many more still have created such devices using sensors, mobile apps, and microprocessors such as the Raspberry Pi. We see examples using the Raspberry Pi on a daily basis, from simple motion-controlled lights and security cameras to advanced devices using temperature sensors and WiFi technology to detect the presence of specific people.

    How to Make a Smart Security Camera with a Raspberry Pi Zero

    In this video, we use a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a Raspberry Pi camera to make a smart security camera! The camera uses object detection (with OpenCV) to send you an email whenever it sees an intruder. It also runs a webcam so you can view live video from the camera when you are away.

    To get started building your own autonomous technology, you could have a look at our resources Laser tripwire and Getting started with picamera. These will help you build a visitor register of everyone who crosses the threshold a specific room.

    Or build your own Raspberry Pi Zero W Butter Robot for the lolz.

    Website: LINK