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This page is out dated. There will be more recent news upcoming.

Newsflash:
DARC embeddedcontrol helps robotbuilders with imageprocessing for Melexis Trophy robotcontest.
The contest:
Melexis has organised the second Melexis thropy. This is a robot contest where small robots compete for setting the best finishing time on a very difficult game area.
No remote controls just clever programming and smart use of hardware.

Our involvement:
DARC embeddedcontrol has sponsored the team Yoda with its image processing library and its expertise.  The library does realtime image to object translation where objects can be classified and grouped for interpretational purposes.

A report by team Yoda about their robot and the Melexis Trohpy:
Below a photograph of Team Yoda receiving the innovation prize for their design of Yoda, the omnidirectional robot.
The innovation prize is a trip to the Detroit Sensors Expo in the U.S. .  TeamYoda are Peter Kunst (in the picture at the right holding the flag) and Jan Rinze Peterzon (in the picture at the left holding flag and flowers). 



The Robot:
The robot uses a quite unconventional design. The base of the robot is built on a circular platform with 3 omnidirectional wheels. These wheels allow the robot to move in any direction without the need to turn and face that direction. Many spectators at the contest have descibed it as resembling a hoovercraft. The motion is controlled by three motors which have their speed calculated by the dot product of their exerting force and the desired direction.  A photograph of the robot at the starting line is shown below.


What does the robot see ?
The robot has a 60 degree field of view which allows it to see most objects positioned in the area directly in front of it. 60 degrees field of view means that objects positioned in front of the robot are visible at positions to the left and right up to half their distance to the robot.  During the build an debugging stages we used a detachable wireless connector. This allowed us to transmit live video and an image processing overlay. During practise sessions we could watch and follow what the robot was seeing and what it could recognise.



Above in bright conditions, below in dark conditions.

Thats all quite interesting but... what 's inside?!

Platforms and OS-es on the robot:
All the robot hardware is directly controlled by the Ethernut, a small formfactor Atmel AT-Mega 128 board driven by NutOS. This in turn is being controlled over ethernet by an ARM-Linux box, the Netwinder.

The NutOS is a multithreaded applications library developed by Harald Kipp from Egnite Software GMBH. There is a website covering all the details of this small but versatile platform.

The Netwinder is a small Linux  box with a 275 Mhz Intel StrongARM, 128MB SDRAM and we fitted a 128 MB compact flash on top of the box to be able to do complete disc image updates.

Motors, wheels and powerdrivers:
Because of the sheer weight of the robot we needed powerfull motors. The proper choice for us was Maxon motors.