Monday, December 14, 2009

UGV work

Another kind of cool development is that we were asked to see if we could make a unmanned ground vehicle,UGV, with the same brains as we use in the UAVs. That combined with our ripe fruit turret idea gave me a bunch of new ideas about how to separate the hardware from the software stacks. The turret will use some interesting ideas on color detection and correction to detect whether fruit is ripe enough to be picked.

Now there is a UGV in the mix. What better a system to tow the turret around, than a 1/5th scale 4WD buggy. It is also leading us onto a bunch of other applications with the same device. Our new ideas, we hope are very investment worthy. If President O actually does something for small business, then we may be able to attract some investment. I think that there are several interesting campus or property management applications that will make the software easy enough to develop and/or repurpose.

Hopefully, I will get some more pictures of our electric conversion of the buggy and some assembly stuff. So that everyone can get an idea of how to do the electric conversion and the other steps that we took setting things up. We have some math that we have already worked out to hopefully help reduce some of the initial setup mistakes. Many scientific papers all say that small alignment errors in setup can ruin the mathematical assumptions that are made in software. That is why we keep trying to set up our software and then back out the math. Not always a working approach, but it is better than thinking everything is perfect.

Neah, engineers are never perfect... we are within 20%, 80% of the time.