Inspiration
We had no real inspiration. Everyone of us just wanted to learn something, we chose technologies and started to think what can we do together with that.
What it does
Our project is a game based on classic video game "Duck Hunt", but instead of using guns, the hunter chases its prey until it gets close enough. We have two robots. The first one (Duckbot) is human-controlled via a smartphone with Bluetooth connection and the second one (Hunter) is autonomous. The Duckbot has a yellow duck attached to it. When the Hunter recognizes it with camera, it drives toward it. So we have basically one robot running and the second one chasing.
How we built it
Robots' platforms were prepared earlier, however the whole control part wasn't. We've got arduino platforms here, on AGHacks and we started wiring and coding our robots.
Duckbot Duckbot consists of platform, two wheels with engines, one small wheel, breadboard, arduino, bluetooth module, batteries and -last but not least - the duck. We had to connect all the parts, program arduino, etc. Then we created an interface which allows us to control the Duckbot with mobile phone.
Hunter Hunter's platform was taken from our another robot and most of the wiring was already there. We added arduino, RPi and camera and made all the parts talk to each other.
Vision system consists of Raspberry Pi and camera. The whole image processing algorithm is implemented on Mathematica and is supervised by python script. It feeds the duck's position to the arduino, which then steer the engines accordingly.
Challenges we ran into
Duckbot
Enabling communication via bluetooth was a challenge.We managed to control the Duckbot using terminal on android, however creating a dedicated app was a little bit too much. We also tried to improve how smooth the control works and adjusting the power for the engines turned out to be harder than we thought.
Hunter Communication was the main problem of the hardware part for this robot. We tried a different methods and testing and implementing them was certainly a challenge. In the vision system the main challenge was using Mathematica and RPi. In spite of a lot of experience in using Mathematica, this was a totally different - something more similar to a RT system. Rpi also doesn't offer much computing power so we had to understand how processes on RPi and Mathematica are working and what to do to optimize them.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're glad our robots work fine and main goals of our project has been accomplished, esspecialy video recognition algorithms.
What we learned
None of us had known the Arduino platform before the AGHacks, so it was a good opportunity for us to get to know a new technology. Moreover, we made some progress while working on optimization vision systems algorithms and making cross-platform communication (RPi - Arduino, Android - Arduino). Also the Bluetooth technology is now a bit more "common" for us.
What's next for Duck Hunter
First of all, we plan to make some dedicated app for Android platform to control the Duckbot. Then maybe upgrade the car with some more "horsepower" or add some sensors and improve the design. There is also a lot of place for improvements in the vision system. It worked only at certain range and not as fast as we would like.
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