xmod drives itself
 

Here is a video of my first attempt to make my Hummer drive itself. The Hummer is not being driven by remote control. I've used a microcontroller and an ultrasonic range finder. In the near future, I plan to clean up the wiring, create a true circuit board, and greatly improve the logic.

Right now, it only has one range finder. In the future, I may add side and rear range finders or perhaps a rotating 360 degree range finder/sonar/proximity sensor.

Please let me know your thoughts, ideas for improvement, etc.

Sorry for the poor quality video (and mod) :D

YouTube Video

jeez dude good work thats some really hard wiring good work never thought anybody could even attempt to that. get the idea from that robo cars show on discovery?

wow, that's pretty amazing! lol, nice work!

wow man thats great cant wait to see the up dates!

That's something we would have tried to do in robotics, and we never quite got it right. I'm surprised that you can do this on such a small scale. Great job :)

Are you using the microcontroller to drive the motor and servo, or did you manage to emulate the Xmod remote's signal? If it's the former, you're smart, if the latter, you're a god. o_O

What's the program you're feeding it now? "Stay away from the wall"?

Oh, Em, Ef, Gee.


It acts a lot like the ROOMBA robot vacuum. Though maybe not as smart right now (ROOMBA can learn the layout of a room in it's run cycle and then just hover close to anything) but this is still very cool. Similar to the off road race they hold every year for the self navigating/driving cars... DARPA?

you should make these things for a living. you could sell them here or on ebay. you could get a lot of money for them!

Wow, that is really neat. I am taking a robotics class in school and one of my first ideas in the class was to automate an xmod or use an xmod somehow for one of my projects. Looking forward to the updates.

I'm using a microcontroller and a motorcontrol IC to drive the motor directly. I'm not emulating the Xmod's remote at all. I actually removed the original circuit board all together. I hope to make replacement circuit boards soon that I can just drop straight in and look very professional rather than the mess of wire you see in the vid.

Right now, the logic that I have in place says something like if you are close to something, slow to 1/2 speed and turn a little. If you are even closer, then stop, backup, turn a little, and then take a new distance reading and figure out what to do next. It has a long way to go to be really nice, but I do have the basics down (controlling fwd/reverse and left/right/center).

i was waching the darpa think on sci channel and now i know what that spinning thing is thanks lol. what you could do is use a small really fast motor and connect it to a tupe like piece with mirros in it so the reader goes around like the real thing. so it spins really fast.or just use a mirrior type setup.

as far as the wires just use some dean plugs and hide them under the body. then you can just connect and disconnect.

Do you really think people would buy a kit with this stuff in it?

The parts it takes add up to around $50-75, but that could be much cheaper if you ordered the parts in bulk to create 100 or so kits at once.

Someone has super skittlez...

You should attach a knife to it, let it loose in a hallway...

OMG....thats would be so funny. :lol: :lol:

I'm seen mini ones of these before, but they sucked. This one has real potential, I think it will be really cool when its finished. I'll have to look into what ever that DARPA or whatever. :bigwink:

oh heck yeah people would buy it! but of coarse you would first need some to pre-order it, then make/sell it. you dont want to make 100 of these, and only 20 buy one.

Nice also Jason...Do u have a PhD??

wow. nice. wtf. You are amazing man, yea what are you feeding it? Also can you give me a wiring diagram. I wanna know, can you show me?:lol:

maybe you could make a chase car that chases and drives