WaySight And AutoNav-Mini Team Up For Easy Teleoperation
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 30 of March , 2009 at 2:08 am
TORC, one of the winning teams from the DARPA Urban Challenge, has taken some of the technology behind their autonomous cars and simplified and repackaged it to be suitable for small, teleoperable and semi autonomous robots. TORC is offering two systems… The first, called WaySight, is a scope of sorts with a viewfinder, a laser, and some simple buttons. Using the scope, you sight the laser in on a point, click a button, and the robot will create a GPS waypoint at that location and navigate to it. You can set up a whole series of waypoints this way, if you like. If that’s not simple enough, you can also use accelerometers in the WaySight to steer the robot directly by tilting the unit around. The other system is called the AutoNav-Mini, and it’s a GPS/IMU system that’s compatible with a whole suite of obstacle avoidance sensors which allows for simple autonomous navigation between waypoints. Basically, you provide the data, and the AutoNav-Mini is the brain that drives the robot.
TORC says that these technologies are designed to be less expensive than other comparable hardware and are therefore more accessible to non-government and non-military organizations, but since they don’t specify the price anywhere I can find and this stuff still IS military hardware (it uses a JAUS integration system), my guess is that you won’t be able to bolt it onto your ComBot without taking out a second and third mortgage. I’d love to be wrong.
Engineering TV has some cool hands-on walkthroughs of both the WaySight and the AutoNav Mini.
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Comment by TORC
Made Friday, 3 of April , 2009 at 1:44 pm
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