Semi-Autonomous steering for Engineering Club Go Kart. This is a project that the Engineering Club at Foothill College was working on. They may have continued in a different repo.
The pictures included show some of the calculations and plans we made during the design stage.
When I worked on the project in 2016, we were using an Arduino Board but have since found that it is incapable of meeting our system's needs.
###Milestone 1 The first goal that my team and I worked on was to have the Go-Kart adjust its path and heading angle to be at a set distance and parallel to a wall. It was planned that Go-Kart would be able to drive from any angle and any location until it got to be a predetermined distance away from a wall, and then drive parallel to it. However, we ran into trouble when we found that the Arduino could not perform its tasks in a timely manner, due to a lack of multithreading (as far as we understood at the time).
It's intended tasks:
- Calculate Go-Kart's heading angle using input from two ultrasonic proximity sensors
- Drive steering motor (PMW) accurately and consistently to a desired angle.
Achievements: Calculate angle in relation to a wall using two proximity sensors. Identiy (with good certainty) a bottleneck in our system.
Changes I would make if I worked on this project again are:
- Use a Raspberry Pi 3 or even a more capable computer.
- Try to verify that my goal is achieveable with my hardware before trying to implement a solution.
- Aim for a tougher milestone which would include the need for a camera and use photo recognition software such as OpenCV