Waypoint driven car

Other Hardware Sensors
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I'm working on a small robot car that can drive from room to room and stop at a predefined terminal. I'm trying to build a real life drone video game.

I started out with an Arduino connected to a 3 wheeled car chassis.
I added an ultrasonic sensor so it can detect walls but it still can't detect the terminal object.

I thought I may want to stream video back to a windows PC by WiFi so I added an ESP32 camera which lagged really bad so I abandoned that. I'm still looking for a good IP camera.

I looked at the Husky camera as well as the Pixy2 for way points and I may be on the right track but they don't transmit the video back to the PC.
I don't want to have to draw a line on the floor but I did think about colored yarn.

GPS is not reliable indoors so I think a way point approach is a much better idea.

I know what I'm building is nothing new so I thought I'd see if anyone else has gone down this path please.

Thanks ahead of time.

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Raspberry Pi Zero II W + camera? Probably won't need the Arduino if you use that, you can write code on the Pi to control the car.

I don't understand. Waypoints are usually GPS coordinates. But, as you say, doesn't work indoors.

You also seem to be saying that a camera can somehow locate waypoints. What do you mean?

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Thanks for replying.
From what I've read and know about GPS is the sat's can't track indoors and they aren't reliable for anything less then a meter.

I'm not adverse to using a Pi, the Arduino and the ESP32 is what I have handy.

As for the camera, the Pixy2 can recognize objects, so I thought about visual waypoints...
https://docs.pixycam.com/wiki/doku.php?id=wiki:v2:porting_guide#analog-and-digital-output

The camera can read barcodes too, but unless it's following a line, it may miss them. I've seen it track a ball rolling so what if I laid out a series of markers?

Now I'm playing with the HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Distance Sensors to see if I can map the walls, but the car would have to be in the center, or have one on each side.

This would give me the distance from the car's position to the wall on both sides.
That plus the car's width should give a distance from wall to wall.
I thought about a LIDAR unit. That would give back points that I could map in a 3D matrix and save it to a micro SD card.
That's way overkill but it's a neat project.

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You will probably appreciate this spectacular project:

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Hello Gary,

There are a few options:

  • Ultrasound-based indoor positioning system: https://marvelmind.com/
  • UWB-based systems
  • Optical systems: either cameras or LIDARs

All have pros and cons:

For indoors, you need as high accuracy of positioning as possible. RTK GPS would be great, but it relies on GPS and doesn't work indoors. UWB is good but often is not enough because your cars are typically 10-50 cm in size. Thus, with the typical accuracy of UWB of ±10-30 cm, it is not enough for measuring direction. At the same time, with ultrasound systems capable of ±2cm, it is possible:

Examples of waypoints driving:

Optical systems are also good, but they are often not reliable enough without QR codes. They may also be too sensitive to light conditions.

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