Lucky Luke autonomous robot
Introduction
We believe in investing in the future through education. QGears sponsors a computer science faculty at a local high school (the Szent István High School, Budapest), and in this fruitful collaboration, we built an autonomous robot.
The robot, called Lucky Luke, was built for magyarok a Marson (Hungarians on Mars) competition, a nationwide contest for autonomous robot construction. We have achieved:
- 7th place of 28 teams
- the special award for the most autonomous robot
- the special award for the youngest team
Public appearance
Lucky Luke was introduced at The Budapest New Technology Meetup Group.
Team Name
The team was registered to the competition as "'; ELDOB TÁBLA *.* ; --". That is abbreaviated as "E.T.". It is the Hungarian version of "'; DROP TABLE *.* ; --". The name was inspired by xkcd: Exploits of a Mom. The twist is that the translated form of that exploit does not work on any real database (a geeky joke :-).
The robot was christened "Villám Will". That is the Hungarian name of the famous hero in Lucky Luke Comics.
Video
Architecture
The Architecture of Lucky Luke autonomous robot is discussed on a separate page.
Technology overview
Tecnhologies that we used while building the robot:
- Omnidirectional drive using omniwheels
- Custom shaft was created by Sárközy János artisan craftsman
- motors actuated by PID controllers implemented on Arduino paltform
- custom built DC motor driver based on a H-Bridge design
- On-board high level control and Wifi communication implemented using Embedded Linux on BeagleBoard development platform
- Software of control room implemented in Java using Eclipse based technologies
- GPGPU based image recognition implemented in OpenCL