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.

If you were an UGV, what kind of truck would you be?

This week I have been digging into the 2d plane again. Yeah, that sounds kind of odd, but I think it is pretty accurate. I am looking for a platform that will let me test my own avionics and code in a way that will not have $10k at 300' and then in a heartbeat have it smashed into dust . The ground does rush up pretty quickly at the wrong times.

One of my colleagues at my real job has egged me on, so I have been evaluating what it takes to get my software to work in a constant altitude kind of setup. Ok for all non-geeks, it means on a truck. I think that the premise has been tossed around several times.

I found that several things during this evaluation. One, electric 1/5th scale trucks are not common. There are lots of 25cc gasser trucks. The three that I was reviewing were:

HPI Baha 5T






NuTech Mega Monster






Redcat Racing







After reading a bunch of information about all of these chassis, and 10's or 100's of reviews and projects. I even found 1 from Sony on the HPI... The Nutech seems to be ahead in the research. It does not weigh as much as the Redcat. The Nutech is Chinese, try not to just mail money to them these days. The HPI has great reviews but is significantly more expensive. I have not found anything to say that one is better than the others. So it may come down to weight and cost.

I will not be using the 23-26cc engine. It will be replaced with some pretty beefy NEU motors and a lot of LiPo. My Mini9 will probably be its brain for the foreseeable future. I do need to work on a COM to handle the code.

Kind of cool to watch the movies of these guys flipping around. I know mine won't do it, but will get its fair share of curb crashing I am sure.