Our project was based around terrain mapping inspired by similar work done by Spot, the agile mobile robot developed by Boston Dynamics. With the rise of both robot-operated and future human-operated missions on the Moon, knowing the lunar surface has become essential. We wanted to use LiDAR and IMU to pathfind through a room and create a point cloud mapping any obstacles encountered. And thus, the Terrain Observation and Fieldwork Unit (T.O.F.U) was born.
Ultimately, our project scope was narrowed to focus on TOFU’s teleoperated movement and obstacle detection. A Raspberry Pi was used as the primary compute board, with an Ubuntu OS running a ROS2 framework for real-time motion control and sensor integration. The TT motors were wired to motor drivers and the ultrasonic sensor was wired to the Raspberry Pi through a breadboard, giving TOFU’s his signature eyes.
All the challenges our team faced were triumphed by a major setback halfway through the hackathon period. The Raspberry Pi stopped booting and reading the SD card, halting all software development. These were likely symptoms of voltage issues with the provided 9V batteries. Over the course of the next four hours, our team troubleshooted the Pi while trying to recover data and lost work. The SD card had to be re-flashed multiple times to pinpoint the root of the error, all software had to be reinstalled, and hardware was rewired multiple times to ensure it wasn’t part of the error. After painstaking troubleshooting and patience, the Pi was brought back online and we began wrapping up loose ends. We’re extremely grateful to the team who gave us an SD card during our troubleshooting.
Overall, we’re proud of how well we picked ourselves back up after almost losing the most essential component of our rover. There were times we looked at each other and genuinely asked each other “when do we call it quits?” and still refused to give TOFU up.
We learned the ins and outs of the electrical and hardware components linking the Pi to its peripherals, as well as the intricacies of ROS2. We also learned how much more there was to build with a system like TOFU, already having decided what steps are next after Robotech, with plans to bring TOFU back to life as a personal project, complete with PID control for autonomous pathfinding and mapping, and possibly an LCD display for cute faces as TOFU completes his missions.
Built With
- cad
- linux
- python
- raspberry-pi
- rclpy
- ros2
- solidworks
- tt-motor
- ultrasonic-sensor
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