I'm currently doing a project whereby a robot has to follow a user and that user alone. So to establish a connection between the user and the robot, I plan to use bluetooth. But I have no idea of how to make the robot receive coordinates of the user's location so that it could follow the user. Any ideas of how I can do that?
Take the difference of the robot's location and the user's location, and invoke the ghost of Pythagoras.
I'm quite sure that sending coordinates over Bluetooth is dead easy. No experience but I'm willing to bet that the answer is a quick Google query away.
What I'm really curious about: how do you plan to actually obtain those coordinates in the first place?
wvmarle:
I'm quite sure that sending coordinates over Bluetooth is dead easy. No experience but I'm willing to bet that the answer is a quick Google query away.What I'm really curious about: how do you plan to actually obtain those coordinates in the first place?
Ah I guess I kinda forgot to mention that I wasn't sure of how I would get the coordinates. I assumed I had to use a compass or something for that but I am relatively new to arduino and thus have no idea how I should program that. Which is why I was asking for the best and simplest way to receive coordinates and sending them to the robot.
I did consider other options of how the robot should track the user like IR transmitter and receiver. But everythibg still boils down to the user's location coordinates.
A compass gives you an orientation (it tells you where north is).
GPS could give you absolute coordinates - if you don't mind that this is typically around 3 meters off, and in the city the signal may start bouncing due to reflections and can be 50-200 meters off, and indoors it doesn't work, and under thick clouds your accuracy goes down to 5-10 meters, and under the trees it may not work well.
The good news though is that you don't care about the actual coordinates of the robot nor of the master. You only care about where the robot is relative to the master.
An IR beacon may give you direction (if you use something like a radar-like scanner on the robot) but no distance and it requires line of sight. You do risk the robot following a reflective wall rather than its master.
Bluetooth doesn't require line of sight but probably less directional sensitive and may be blocked by walls or so. Still no distance.
Anyway - do start reading a bit more about following robots, and soon you'll understand why those things are still not available commercially. But then, you may succeed where no-one else did.
And as for the Bluetooth side, rather than concentrating on the end solution, start simple;
What do I have to do to pass a simple message, "Hello World" for example between the user and the robot ?