HW Upgrade - Seeker Of Ways - B

1Abstract 1

2Old Seeker Of Ways 2

2.1Robot 2

2.2Old Hardware Architecture 3

3Hardware Upgrade 4

3.1New Hardware Architecture 4

3.2New Robot 5

4Future upgrades 6

5Conclusions 7

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1Abstract

After the success of the Maze Runner FPV demo, the next step is to upgrade the previously developed robot, Seeker Of Ways to the latest hardware architecture.

2Old Seeker Of Ways

2.1Robot

Seeker Of Ways was meant as a development platform in which to test the overall architecture.

2.2Old Hardware Architecture

Two prototyping custom boards were used to test the twin DC motors control capabilities, power stage and ROS interface. SoW is powered by a single flexible power source.

3Hardware Upgrade

3.1New Hardware Architecture

A custom board has been developed to collect all hardware functionalities in a single board of the same form factor as the Raspberry Pi

3.2New Robot

The new hardware architecture is much more compact, having one custom board for power, motors, arduino shield and act as a Raspberry Pi hat.

4Future upgrades

Ongoing testing revealed a number of issue with this revision of the custom RPI/Arduino hat

• Spacing between some components is bad
  
• SEPIC takes a lot of space. Design a Buck version
  
• Planes and Bots have different requirements
  
  • Planes need a light board with an onboard IMU and GPS
    
  • Bots need an Arduino shield with option for DC motors/Servo
    
  • Use a dedicated 328p for the Arduino. There is lots of firmware inside the main uC that would interfere with the user firmware for the Arduino Shield
    
• Add precision power measurement
  
• Use a XT60 connector for power and add a switch to enable the ideal diode
  

On the software side

• Latency of the camera needs to go down
  
• Use a raspicam for both standard/cheap video capture and lower latency
  
  • Look into WebRTC
    
• Add a USB LTE radio option for cellular connection
  
• Web page should have a tab for the robot script and the Arduino shield all hosted inside the RPI. Ideally a wizard for the web page as well. Maybe an IP address in developer mode
  

5Conclusions

With the hardware upgrade, all prototype boards have been shrunk in a single board
Next step is to work on the hardware and software stack to improve the FPV capabilities
The vision is to have a system that allows easy creation of a custom FPV robot with one board and an IDE integrated inside the Raspberry Pi itself