Search the Community

Hi I'm starting a mBot simulator ( http://store.makeblock.com/product/mbot-robot-kit ) mBot is an arduino based robot-car programmed in a scratch environment for educational purposes. The thing is that in a classroom normally there are more students than robot's and a simulator should be handy in the mean time a real robot gets free for playing. By now I implemented the communications protocol between the Scratch IDE and the Simulator. Connection is made via a Software Virtual Port Pair emulator, because, the IDE connects to the robot via a serial port, and sends commands and receives sensed data form the robot via this way. For starting I implemented a sub set of commands: Move motors, ultrasonic sensor (for distance to walls measurement: obstacle avoidance) and Line followers (yes.. for the same purpose :). Firsts test are ok. Here a couple of videos, first having both programs interconnected, running a simple program in scratch and seen the robot act as commanded. Program is so simple, move forward, move backward, turn right, turn left.. Second video shows the same program running on a real robot, not the mBot, just one i made compatible with it. just another real hardware test For the ultrasonic sensor I'm using world->Pick and for the line followers sensor I'm using a couple of cameras which renders to a texture, then i average the light seen getting the pixels of the texture and simply averaging them. Next steps will be, testing a obstacle avoidance and line follower automatic motion program, with the simulator and real hardware. Simulator has to match as much as possible the real hardware so still much to do on metrics. Her a couple of snap shoots: Juan