R/C car robot conversion

[DubbedTheBeast]

i am starting a project on a traxxas rustler i picked up yesterday to create a self navigating car. now personally i have no radio control experience but i have time to burn by learning something new. now as for my short term plan, i want to first mount 3 wireless cameras. one will be controllable to get better views of things that catch my attention. the other two will be front and back views. that part i can handle easily. now the battery that is used to power the car's electronics has such powerful out-puts, i will not be using it to power the electronics i will be adding to this. for that i plan to add a 12v or so laptop battery that would be more than enough for the cameras and later a second may need to be added to have extended life for when the logic chips, sensors, indicators, servos and extra telemetry circuits are added. it may not be necessary to add the second because the car's battery will normally drain in just a couple hours and the other circuits will only need to last just a bit longer.

now the grand scale of the project will be to have the car itself move from it's starting position to a pre-determined location. now because i have not taken on a project anywhere near this complex i will likely spend a years worth of weekends working out the bugs and researching similar robots.

as for the things that will not need to truly be reinvented are things like adding relays to the wires coming from the r/c receiver to alternate between radio control and automated control, to prevent reverse current without using transistors that will change the amount of current. wiring servos and reducing power to more sensitive components i can do. my real problem is actually programming chips to react to different wavelengths. i also do not know how to have iR sensors and range finders give logical signals to control the output of those programmed chips. those things i will definitely need help with.

is there anyone out there that knows how to gain control out of range finders and iR x/y sensors(or x/y/z)? has anyone ever attempted to make anything similar?

[Jeff Bobbo]

I actually done this with some friends two years ago. Well, somewhat. We entered a competition to make a car which can control it self with no human interference. It was pretty simple. We used 2 ultrasonic range finders, 2 8 pin PIC chips (One for each range finder), and a 16 pin PIC on the motherboard. We also had 2 microswitches (sometimes the sensors didn't detect and object to the side, like a wall running only a few degrees from parallel to the vehicle). Two motors (for each wheel, left and right), were controlled by the main PIC, via a relay board allowing us to use a better power supply (4 AA batteries compared to 2 for the PIC).

I done most of the programming. I have the program for the 8 pin pics and one for the 16pin pic. I also have the copy of the folder we had to produce, which contains parts of the program and circuit diagrams. XD

You could just work some of that, and add RC equipment and such forth. XD

[FOOKz™]

I have also done a similar project to what Jeff explained.

Parallax has a robot kit which you can use sensors as input devices to detect walls and stuff. The Parallax kits include BASIC STAMP which lets you basically do almost anything.... some of the programming is a bit limited compared to normal PIC programming.

My end of things the programming is the toughest part... but i recently just started learning how to code and I don't know everything there is to know.

Sounds like you have a cool project man  there's going to be many problem-solution type deals dude good luck.

is there anyone out there that knows how to gain control out of range finders and iR x/y sensors(or x/y/z)? has anyone ever attempted to make anything similar?

Accelerometer hand in hand with an ultrasonic detector.

You program the chip to measure the pitch/angle of the car; if the car's angle is too steep you tell it to disregard the ultrasonic detector because it would ether be measuring the ground or it would be measuring the distance in the sky.

The ultrasonic detector can also help determine the kind of terrain there is ... say there's flat terrain which would allow the whole car to run faster than normal. BUT what if the ultrasound detector finds obstacles... well then the accelerometer will have to do double duty to detect if it hits a wall/goes over a bump it will have to move out of the way or slow down even further.