The Jackbot
Daniel Benamy (dbenamy att gmail)
Benjamin Cohen (bencohen2 att gmail)
The Jackbot is a self driving robot car that we built for the Mini Grand Challenge competition run by Penn State Abington.
The Jackbot team is proud to announce that our entry into the 2010 Competition is sponsored by
2010 Competition
We won!!! We completed the whole course (including part 2) for the first time since the competition has been going on. Here's a video of the winning run.
Our vision code still isn't perfect, but it was good enough to get us through with some help from the "get unstuck" code.
- Switched our road detection to work with the HSV color space instead of RGB.
- Added a noise filter which is able to detect regions that the first pass thinks are road but aren't, for example wood chips and soil in the picnic area ground.
- Brightness, contrast, and saturation done in our software. In the end we mostly used the Logitech tool for this, but did a little more processing in our code.
- New shaft encoders. The new ones looked like this at first:
While that worked nicely indoors, in the sun they didn't work at all. I covered one with paper and tinfoil to keep light out and that fixed the problem. Here's what the outputs looked like with one covered and one uncovered:
See http://picasaweb.google.com/dbenamy/NewShaftEncoders# for more pictures. - Greatly improved speed control with braking when we go too fast.
- Better unstick behavior- invert steering while backing up.
- Some performance work, mostly fruitless.
- New, more accurate, gps.
- Fixed part 2 behavior.
- Improved logging of all sensors and outputs so we can review what the robot did when not at the course.
- Playback of video logs.
- Faster laptop. The new image processing code is slower than the old and we couldn't have run fast enough on the old laptop.
- Much improved code with some unit tests.
- Changed steering servo for same model with metal gears and screwed in the gear attached to it.
- Added speed and power info to gui.
Notes for previous years are on the Previous Competitions page.
The source code is publicly available by clicking the "Mercurial & Trac" link above or here. We have a couple of logs of runs committed which other teams may also find useful for testing.