Platform for Robot Research

I am no longer an undergraduate in college and therefore don't have access to the pre-built robots of my former University. You can check these out in the GPS navigation robot project. I had a radio controlled car sitting around from my youth and wanted to turn it into a platform that I could use for robotic research. After a little bit of testing, I created a circuit board which uses a FTDI chip and Atmega microcontroller to create pulse width modulation to control the steering and engine on the RC car. You can see this in action on the video above.

I also created a rs232 to USB converter as well so that the GPS unit I have can be integrated into this project too!

Future plans are to combine this and the flash electronic control project in order to make a really cool platform that I can use for extending the research of "High Speed Obstacle Avoidance using Monocular Vision and Reinforcement Learning" Jeff Michels, Ashutosh Saxena, Andrew Y. NG. In ICML, 2005.