Back on track

Good news :)
After a lot of hard work (mainly by Dror with a lot of help from Doron)
HANS has gained control of its wheels again.
Now we can go back to working on the needed modules for HANS to be able to localize itself
in the world.
We hope this little side trip we had to take won't sway us to far from our schedule...

Oh no

2 weeks ago a power surge (or so we think) has fried some of HANS' circuitry.
As a result HANS is currently disabled. We are working now on finding replacement chips
for the burnt parts and replacing them.
I hope we'll get back into full development soon.

1st Milestone reached

For our first Milestone we needed to finish the physical process of building the robot
And writing a fly-by-wire system for it.
I am glad to say that we have reached this milestone today.

This short movie shows Dror controlling HANS using the keyboard
By the way - You can also see that HANS has two platforms now:
The lower platform holds the power module and the upper one holds the sensors
and the robot brain (the laptop).

Some updates

So...
It's been a long while since we last updated the blog.
We have been working on the physical aspect of building HANS (I'll upload some pictures
soon) . Working with hardware is always a nuisances. Bolts don't fit, wires break and hard wirings fail... And when you finally get it all hooked up you see that the voltage you get from the
power supply is either too low or too high :)

HANS has also decided to play some tricks on us and has developed a slight tendency to steer
to the right. We think we solved the problem by adjusting the weight balance and the height ratio of the rear wheels.

We have also been thinking about the software design.
I present to you the -close to final- design. I am aware that not all of it is in English,
but I guess not a lot of foreigners, non Hebrew speakers will follow the blog :)
If I am wrong just email one of us and ask...
A short description of each module can be found here

We have decided to work with the Player/Stage robot development environment instead of
Microsoft's Robotic Studio because it has been around for a longer time and it is considered
(for now) to have the largest active community of developers.

We have written a fly-by-wire Player client module for the robot and a simple robot driver for the Player server that can get movement commands and output sonar and compass readings.
Our next step will be to make a module that reads the compass,sonar, GPS and wheel encoders data and is able to localize the robot on the campus map... Wish us luck ;)

DARPA Urban Challenge

A landmark event in the field of autonomous vehicles has happened.

DARPA has announced the winners of the Urban Challennge.
CMU's robot Boss (seen in the attched picture) has won first place and has been awarded 2M$ !!
Junior from Stanford (Our favorite robot) has arrived at the second place.
Virgina Tech's Victor Tango has taken the third place.

To read more about the Urban Challenge you can visit DARPA's website.

Baby steps and thoughts about programming languages

Today we've met to discuss what should we choose as our main developing platform and
what will be our programming language. A final decision was not yet made but we are inclined to use Microsoft Robotic Studio for the robot control and Roborealm for our vision modules. This means we will need to write (at least most of) our code in .NET compatible language.

Even more important then that (or at least more exciting) is that HANS made a small step towards being autonomous - It moved back and forward :)
Take a look for yourselves

First post

OK. So this is the first post for the Hans project. We will be trying to post updates
and photos when they become available.

Basically, HANS stands for HUJI's Autonomous Navigation System (Just in case you haven't heard HUJI stands for Hebrew University of Jerusalem ;> ). We hope that by the time
we finish working on it (Should be August of 2008) HANS will be worth it's name :)

Our plan is to make a mobile robot (A laptop with a GPS, sonar range detector and a camera residing on top a wheeled platform) that will be able to navigate it's way in the Givat Ram campus. In order to do that we will need to come up with good strategies for road recognition, obstacle avoidance, path planning etc'. As our time (and brain power) is limited we will probably look for simple methods that (hopefully) have been tried before to some extent :)


I'll start you up with a picture of the team opening the box containing the mobile base.
For more pictures you can go to HANS' online photo album: http://picasaweb.google.com/yairmov/HANS