Waterborne, so not a UAV exactly
HI all.
Yes I realise that this is not quite a UAV (a UWV maybe?)
I am amidst a project to design a guidance system for an unmanned boat.
The boat must be able to maintain a accuracy of 50 metres of deviation over a straight run of 1500 m in the sea. The guidance must be able to correct deviations from waves, currents etc.
In many ways the control system I am designing is similar to those used by a uav (simpler in many ways).
The first prototype made used a PIC16f877a microcontroller with an i2c digital compass, it used a timer to achieve the duration of the run (its not so much the exact length of the run that I am concerned with, rather the deviation from the original course).
The problems with this prototype were unfortunately inherrent with the deisgn path I took, the major problems being problems with tilt perverting the compass heading and heading being unsuitable for guidance alone of this sort of project.
The design brief for this 'boat' is that you must be able to 'point' it in a particular direction and then the boat must set off maintaining this heading to the final point (1500m in this direction).
I have bought an EM406 gps and a 3 axis accellerometer to use in the next prototype.
Hopefully I will be able to use the compass to aquire a heading from the start point, then use the gps to get the start lat and long and then use these to calculate the end point 1500m in the direction of the heading, then of course start out in this direction.
Can anybody give me any pointers about the use of gps for guidance of autonomous vehicles.
Thanks
Bruce
Yes I realise that this is not quite a UAV (a UWV maybe?)
I am amidst a project to design a guidance system for an unmanned boat.
The boat must be able to maintain a accuracy of 50 metres of deviation over a straight run of 1500 m in the sea. The guidance must be able to correct deviations from waves, currents etc.
In many ways the control system I am designing is similar to those used by a uav (simpler in many ways).
The first prototype made used a PIC16f877a microcontroller with an i2c digital compass, it used a timer to achieve the duration of the run (its not so much the exact length of the run that I am concerned with, rather the deviation from the original course).
The problems with this prototype were unfortunately inherrent with the deisgn path I took, the major problems being problems with tilt perverting the compass heading and heading being unsuitable for guidance alone of this sort of project.
The design brief for this 'boat' is that you must be able to 'point' it in a particular direction and then the boat must set off maintaining this heading to the final point (1500m in this direction).
I have bought an EM406 gps and a 3 axis accellerometer to use in the next prototype.
Hopefully I will be able to use the compass to aquire a heading from the start point, then use the gps to get the start lat and long and then use these to calculate the end point 1500m in the direction of the heading, then of course start out in this direction.
Can anybody give me any pointers about the use of gps for guidance of autonomous vehicles.
Thanks
Bruce
Replies to This Discussion
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ModeratorPermalink Reply by Chris Anderson on -
Bruce,
Your questions--"Can anybody give me any pointers about the use of gps for guidance of autonomous vehicles"-- is a bit too general, since you've just described the focus of this entire site and its thousands of posts. But if you're interested in a primer on waypoint math, you could start here.
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Permalink Reply by Bruce on -
Hi Chris
Thanks so much for your help. That primer on the waypoint math will help me get started.
Thanks too for the information you provided on the geocrawler 3 guidance system.
I hope to write my own $GPRMC parser for extracting Latitude and Longitudes and maybe the track made good so your information on the Geocrawler 3 will be of great assistance to me.
As an aside, why do you use Arduino controllers for so much? what are their advantages over 'more traditional' microprocessors. ( I am using a PIC16F877A Processor and have used AVR's in the past)
Thanks
Bruce
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ModeratorPermalink Reply by Chris Anderson on -
Arduino's main advantages are:
--Based on the Atmel Atmega168, which is as standard as a PIC these days.
--Excellent easy-to-use open source IDE
--Huge community creating open-source libraries and sample code.
--Open source hardware platform, so there are any number of specialized version (all open source) available, and you can easily make or modify your own.
--Very cheap
--Cool!
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ModeratorPermalink Reply by Chris Anderson on -
Yes. AVRStudio will work on an Arduino platform, and the Arduino IDE can work with any Atmega168 (you may have to change a few configuration settings)
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