Auto barricade sensing system of a remote-controling car

In this lab section, the research group have prepared for the first demo function which is the emergency braking system. In this function, the car will use the sonar distance sensor as an emergency detector. The sonar distance sensor returns one hundred distance information to the pi and the pi will decide whether it is should stop and prevent hitting. In detail, the research used python to write the program. In this function, the user could control the car as scheduled and the car could avoid the car hit a barrier. We used a while loop constantly and put all the judgement statement inside the loop, which runs following the following logic. The users start the car and control the car by pressing the control keys. The sonar returns distance data by the microsecond. If the data begin to be smaller than 15 centimetres, the car stops automatically and move backwards for 15 centimetres to keep a safe distance and handle the control back to the users. Problems:  The sonar dista...

Change system and problems In the lab section of this week, the research group had a difficult time. In detail, it is difficult to have the video of the camera been transmitted to the computer. The data flows to the raspberry in the form of coordinate, length and height of the marked blocks. In this way, the processor of the pi could be relaxed. However, in the first place ， the basic function of the car is that the user could see what the car sees with the use of camera. If the control system is not visual, it is meaningless to have such a complex system. To make it possible to visualize the streaming video, the research group checked the driver of the camera. It turns out that it is not designed for Raspbian, and this made its function been limited to this system. To solve this problem, the research group had to change the system of the smart car and recode the programs that have been tested. In specific, the driver is designed for a pure Linux environment. Having don...

In this section, the blog mainly introduces the test of the remote-controlling car and the object recognizing.

In the lab section of this week, the research group decided to test the main functions of the car including LED test, movement mode and sonar distance sensor. In the first test, the research group used the test file to test the LEDs in the front of the car. By using the LED, we could know the situation of the car when running the program. For example, when the running situations are normal and it is safe to allow the user to control the car, the LED turns green. If the sensors should discover barriers in the moving routine of the car, the LED could turn red and make the user know it might take charge of the car instead of the user. In the test, the LED will turn red, blue, white, green in the turn. The demo is shown in the video. The second test is the motor test. In this test, the smart car should be able to move according to the orders given by the keyboard. The user could use the direction keys to control the moving direction to make it go straight, go left, go right and g...

In this lab section, the research group managed to activate the pixy 2 camera with a given driver. By using the driver, the research group could cheek whether the camera could run smoothly. Figure 1: Pixy 2 camera Then, the research had to enable the SPI and I2C service in the raspberry pi and introduce the python library module to the raspberry pi for the Pi2go MK2. In this way, all kinds of sensors and motional devices could be activated when necessary. Having activated the camera, the research group began to try the machine learning part of the program. In specific, the car needs to recognize different kinds of barriers and send alerts to the pi and have the pi to judge how to change the moving direction to avoid hitting. The machine learning part is the fatal part of the car. Firstly, the research group managed to do this from a simple task which is to recognize a sign written on paper. The detailed learning and recognition procedure are shown in the video.

Pi2go MK2 Smart car assembling and introduction: In the first week of the project, the research group received the components that will be used in the project. The first thing to do is to assemble the smart car Pi2go MK2. In specific, Pi2go MK2 contains a chip which could control different parts of the car. The raspberry pi uses the GPIO connections to control and power the smart car. Figure 1: GPIO pins to control the car System instaling: Having assembled the car, the research group began to initialize the raspberry pi. According to the instruction, the research group had to instore an operating system into the SD card with SD card formatter and Win 32 Disk Imager. Problem-solving: However, when the raspberry is equipped with the operating system and plugged into a screen, the screen showed the following alert: kernel failure. To solve the problem, the research group tried to restart the pi for several times and it still shows a failure. Then, the researc...