Axis wireless camera, Arduino,
Ethernet shield and Pololu robot
MSc dissertation
proposal 2010/2011
Introduction:
"Although a few of the robots of tomorrow may resemble the
anthropomorphic devices seen in Star Wars, most will look nothing like the
humanoid C-3PO. In fact, as mobile peripheral devices become more and more
common, it may be increasingly difficult to say exactly what a robot is.
Because the new machines will be so specialized and ubiquitous--and look so
little like the two-legged automatons of science fiction--we probably will not
even call them robots. But as these devices become affordable to consumers,
they could have just as profound an impact on the way we work, communicate,
learn and entertain ourselves as the PC has had over the past 30 years."
Excerpt of A Robot in Every Home, Bill Gates,
ScientificAmerican.com, January 2007.
Current home (personal) mobile
robots are starting now to have affordable prices. Those robots can be vacuum
cleaners such as the iRobot Roomba,
can be telepresence robots, as the Anybots' QA, or can be simply Mobile Webcams, such as the WowWee's Rovio [Rovio-www]. Most of these
robots have in common the combination of mobile robotics, video cameras and wireless
communications. Communications are in many aspects the bottleneck of the
robots. In this work we propose using the wireless network of surveillance
cameras as a basis to build networked mobile robots.
Objectives:
The objectives of this work are threefold: (i)
assembling
one Axis 207w camera and one Arduino 2009 on a Pololu robot basis, (ii) developing software to communicating with the Axis cameras and passing commands to a microcontroller
that drives the mobile robot, (iii) developing a graphics user interface to command
the robot while observing the captured images.
Detailed description:
Surveillance is one of the envisaged applications for mobile robots. Surveillance
mobile robots in essence combine mobile robots with cameras and internet
communications. One of the key challenges to build these robots is certainly creating
reliable wireless communication methodologies. In particular, the
communications are expected to work in occupied spectrum scenarios such as most
of today's office environments.
Reliable wireless communication is an issue being effectively approached
by the surveillance camera manufacturers (see e.g. [Axis-www]). The main focus
of the current work is therefore exploring the effective communication methodologies
present in a surveillance camera (more precisely the Axis 207w), link it to a general
microcontroller (Arduino 2009 or Uno [Arduino-www]) and then mount both elements on a mobile
robot (Polulu [Polulu-www]).
The work is therefore organized in the following main steps:
- Mounting the Axis 207w and the Arduino on the Pololu robot basis
- Acquiring video in a PC having a
wireless connection to the Axis camera
- Using the Axis camera to pass-through
commands from the PC to the Arduino
- Designing a user interface
commanding the mobile robot and observing the images captured by the onboard
camera
References:
[Rovio-www] "Rovio Mobile Webcam", http://www.wowwee.com/en/products/tech/telepresence/rovio/rovio
[Axis-www] "Axis 207 Network Camera", http://www.axis.com/files/datasheet/ds_206.207_hsing_0207.pdf
[Arduino-www] "Arduino
open-source electronics prototyping platform", http://www.arduino.cc/
[Polulu-www] "Pololu
RP5 Tracked Tank Chassis Gray", http://loja.lusorobotica.com/125-pololu-rp5-tracked-chassis-gray.html
Requirements (grades, required courses, etc):
-
Expected results:
At the end of the work, the students will have enriched their experience
in creating an embedded system using off-the-shelve components. In particular
are expected to develop and assess:
- The hardware integration of the various components
- Software to interface and monitor the system
Place for conducting the work-proposal:
ISR / IST
Quotation:
"In summary...you don't always get the luxury to pick your term
project, but if you can, find a problem you want to solve for yourself in your
own life. Design a novel solution for it with a PIC or other microprocessor.
Wire it up and program it. Understand the hardware and software well so that
you can present it well. Have a fun time doing it. If you find that you lose
track of time while you are working on the program and find it hard to put it
down even at midnight, you've got exactly the right idea! Best wishes!"
[excerpt extracted from
http://www.vermontficks.org/students.htm]
More MSc dissertation
proposals on Computer and Robot Vision in:
http://omni.isr.ist.utl.pt/~jag