We are planning on constructing a slave robot for our final year project. A Slave robot in a way that it will carry your baggage and follow you around.
We plan on using a pair of pololu IR beacon as the transmitter and receiver of our project. A user will be carrying 1 of the beacon and the other one will be embedded in the Machine. Our robot will also include an anti-collision feature using Utrasonic or solar sensors. The robot should be able to carry around 15-20kg so were are going to use a dc motor.
Questions:
1)Is it possible to program the Pololu IR Beacon in a way that a distance of 0.8-1m meter will be maintained between the user and the machine?
I would like to ask for your input regarding our project, it would really help us a lot.
Thank you in advance.
You can only get directional information from the IR beacon, not ranging information, so you will need feedback from a rangefinder to maintain a fixed distance from the target you’re following. The sonar sensors you are already planning on putting on your robot should work well for something like this, though it seems like it will be hard to distinguish between a stationary obstacle (that you might want to drive around) and the person carrying the other beacon (whom you would not want to drive around). Maybe you could mount the following-distance sonar sensors high up on the robot and use shorter-range optical range finders low on the robot (or angled downward) to react to low obstacles.
ohh so basically we can use the IR beacon to determine the location of the transmitter and when combined with a rangefinder we can determine the distance so that we can maintain a fixed distance? We need to put a separate sonar sensor as a range finder and another one for collision avoidance?
