- VIDEO RCAR Project
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This a short video to show you what RCAR project is able to do, we hope you like it!
- RCAR Project presentation
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The other Interactive
EcoPanels face....
Base on location awareness concept, RCAR Project present an RFID approach to
improve location accuracy of autonomous systems in indoor spaces. The authors of this experiment are Ricardo Tesoriero, José A. Gallud and Ramón Tébar Bueno.
The system is composed by these elements:
- Robot Lego Mindstorm NXT with light sensor and two servomotors.
Basically, we have built a three wheel robot that is able to carry a PDA client
system in the middle of the artifact to get its center position.
The robot is controlled by an application that runs in a desktop PC and gets
through the client by Bluetooth (NXT Remote Control). The MindSqualls library was used to implement the system.
- Sensing surfaces, which are physical surfaces where
autonomous entities, like the NXT robot, can be located within a space. A
sensing surface is divided into a grid of small squared surfaces or locations
units. Each location unit has a unique identifier. To implement this, we have
used passive tags RFID, where each one represents a location unit. Therefore, a sensing surface is defined by a grid of RFID tags..
- PDA with Wi-Fi connection. The PDA has attached a compact flash
passive RFID reader (HF-13.56 MHz), to read tags and retrieve the location unit identification code from the sensing surface. This code is sent
through the wireless communication to a localization manager. To achieve this goal, we have
developed a .NET mobile application that sends these codes to the localiton
manager through low-level socket connection.
***VERY IMPORTANT: PDA and RFID reader is inverted looking up the floor to read the tags RFID easily
- The location manager is responsible for mapping the identification code
to the physical surface that it represents. It is a socket server that is
waiting a request from the RFID mobile client.
- Map representation client. The user can trace the robot route and
explore its localization by means of this application client. In our case, this
is a desktop application which is also connected with the location manager (Map
Representation Client). Nevertheless, it could be a mobile or a web application,
according to our necessities.
***The nxt robot, using the light sensor, is always inside the sensing surface
The system architecture is represented in the following image:
In future posts, we will show a video to demostrate its operation
