Intro to Sensors

License

The materials for this document are licensed under the Apache license. See the file LICENSE for details.

Copyright 2016 M Rose & F Douthit

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Table of Contents

• License
• Overview
• Event Title:
• Sensor Topics
• Programming & Linux OS
• ROS and Robotics
• Logistics

Overview

Sensors are used every day to inform computers of real world events.

Event Title:

Sensors for Robots and more

Sensors for Robots and Everyday use.

Sensor Topics

• Real time clock (RTC) and Raspberry Pi

• IMU

• Sensor calibration and filtering

• Sensor fusion

• GPS

• HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors ($1.50 from one of my favorite suppliers - even - cheaper from China).

• IR sensors

• I2C to talk to a compass or IMU - Compass-only boards are pretty cheap, know of one for $6.

• How to talk to multiple types of sensors, taking turns using each sensor

• Sensor filtering and data integrity strategy

• Advanced concepts would be sensor variance and covariance, also noise. (E.g., noise introduced by the robot.)

• PID controller/wheel encoder

• Kalman filters, e.g., along with variance discussion.

• PIR

• Make a collision detector using spring wire and screws (ultra-cheapo bump detection). (Wire bends when you hit something, causing it to touch a screw that closes a circuit read by a digital input.)

• Using interrupts to read ultrasonic sensor, as opposed to pulseIn(), which will be confused if you use interrupts for anything else, such as wheel encoders.

• Talk about speed of analog reads vs. digital reads, maybe use of pull-up and pull-down resistors.

• An optical component that can read white/black differences - poor-man’s wheel encoder. Kind of shows everything: use of resistor to limit current through an LED, use of pull-up resistor for a phototransistor, reading either analog or digital or interrupt.

Programming & Linux OS

• OpenCV

• Networking in Linux

• Basic Linux shell

• Command usage

• Linux shell scripting

ROS and Robotics

• Robot localization/mapping/SLAM,

• robot kinematics

• SMACH

Logistics

Approximately 1-1.5 hours