Upgrading the Web-Controlled Robot

After my previous post about my web-controlled robot, I was in no way finished working on it. There were still a lot of things I wanted to add, improvements to make here and there. Projects like these are never truly finished: there’s always something more you’ll want to add. For this round, I made a number of improvements to the existing system and added some entirely new systems as well.

 

Switching over to Robotmoose

The first, and perhaps most radical change I made to the system was that I replaced the firmware and even the entire control stack of the robot with the Robotmoose Web Robotics System, a system described as “a simple, modern version of a networked robotics stack, built around the modern web”. It is being designed at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, for a research project I am a part of that aims to increase young student interest in STEM topics by using telerobotics in the classroom. The Robotmoose system is highly configurable, so it can easily be used to control a wide range of robotic platforms!

Connecting Raspberry Pi to Eduroam at UAF

The Raspberry Pi is a great little device, but the fact that it does not have a built in display and keyboard like a laptop can be very inconvenient. I previously wrote a post about a web controlled robot that used a RPi, and while the RPi was great for controlling it, getting the robot onto the school’s wireless network meant connecting a screen and keyboard to the Pi, starting the gui, opening the browser, then logging in to the network.

This setup was very cumbersome, and limited the functionality of the robot. At UAF, eduroam provides a way to connect to the wireless without logging in, so I set out to get my robot to connect to it.Dr. Lawlor has a great blog post about connecting to eduroam on Ubuntu, but the gui on Raspbian, wpa_gui, was so limited that the network could not be set up.

Web Controlled Robot Using Node.js

Note: This post provides a general overview of the project. The source code and instructions for setting up your own rover can be found here.

One day, back in April of this year, I was out salvaging for electrical parts and came across an old RC car. I decided it would be fun to get it up and running again, so I got a Sabertooth motor controller and an RC controller and got it driving around. This was a lot of fun, but I decided what the car really needed was to be able to stream video from a webcam. So I pulled out an old Raspberry Pi Model B, slapped it and a webcam on top of the RC car, and got it to stream video using Motion JPEG. From there, feature after feature was added to the rover, and the project snowballed into a full blown web-controlled robot.

RC Controlled Car with MJPEG Streaming