Hardware Overview

I have yet to explain exactly what our robot is attempting to accomplish. However, a quick synopsis is at the top of my blog. Let me divulge a more in-depth discussion of this information to my readers.

The robot is intended to be used as a military-operated vehicle that employs multiple sensors to detect potential bomb threats by collecting radiological and chemical data. Hundreds of men and women die every year in combat due to un-detected bombs and chemical exposure. The Bomb-Sniffing Robot is a proposed solution to this problem. This project’s goal is to save future men and women from dying preventable deaths in combat. As a result, the robot’s design targets military customers as well as civilian bomb squads.


As a side-note, look at this compelling data on the deaths from bombs within Bagdad, Iraq. The number of deaths just keeps rising (information found from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/in_depth/baghdad_navigator/). 

Now that I hopefully have your attention, lets go over our hardware. The figure below shows the overall hardware diagram. This figure describes the system as it pulls in data and transmits important sensor data.





















The basic operation goes as follows, a user wants to see if there is a bomb or other chemical hazards in an area, but this person does not want to get blown up--so use our Bomb-Sniffing Robot. The user can use the PlayStation controller (hooked up by USB) to control the on board camera's pan/tilt/zoom and robot's direction/speed. From that a GUI sends out the controller commands (via wi-fi) to the robot. Meanwhile, the robot is collecting all sensor data (camera, gps, LPG, propane, carbon monoxide, methane, and radiation). Then the robot transmits to the GUI the sensor information at a constant rate through the wi-fi connection.  The GUI allows the user to see the data in a convenient graphical and numerical format (via graphs).

I will later post an in-depth discussion on our beginning software overview between our two main submodules-- robot and GUI. There you can learn about what is going on in the background and what special features each has to offer. Note that our design is very unique, because you don't need a large amount of on-board memory on the robot, due to the constant transmission of data. Just enough to hold the data for awhile until another transmission can be made.