Radio controlled robot

Since last October I’ve been involved into Focus Scientific Circle (or group) at my university. (Yeah, I know our webpage is horrible…)

From the very beginning we wanted to make a robot. A cool one, precisely. So the idea we had was: let’s take Kinect, some mobile platform/chassis, remote control, Raspberry Pi and mix it all together.

I took a long, long time, but finally we have a semi-working prototype. This week my friends made it possible to control our platform via remote control (the same used to control high-end RC aircrafts). That’s a huge progress for our project.

Meanwhile I’ve been working on special algorithm, which is going to help our Kinect orientate in space.

The idea is to make 3-D maps of insides. The thing is, Kinect doesn’t revolve around any solid axis. Thus I think we could track (via Kinect’s camera) a set of points (features) and measure by which angle our robot turns.

If we know that angle, we could make those 3-D views of insides.

I’m going to use OpenCV and code everything in C++. Hopefully it will work quite fast on our Raspberry Pi.