Copehill Team Visit Day

Monday 15th October five students from Reading University attended the Grand Challenge Teams Visit day at Copehill Down. We brought a LIDAR, a couple of GPS units and an off-the-shelf WIFI unit. We had varied success, the LIDAR gave us a lot of data to process and will be a good starting point for mocking up the environment. The GPS results were as expected, sometimes good and sometimes bad… As for wifi, well it worked as expected.

Overall a good day out, we got a sneaky peak at some other teams, although not much was given away.

Posted by Martyn Posted in: General News No Comments » November 2007

GPS Video

I have put together a video showing the GPS data from Copehill Down, this should give an idea of time, as well as using the red to green colouring to depict the quality of the satellite lock.

This was made using base code from http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/, adding the Javascript to animate the points and to move the ‘camera’ around. There are bugs; it was meant to be 15x actual speed, but firefox slows down after plotting a thousand or so points, and there is glitching between ’scenes’. Might fix it all at a later date.

But for the moment this fits the purpose, the GPS data shows consistent direction when moving in a straight line with a good (green) lock. The errors can get huge when too close to a building, but this is as expected and is easy to identify by looking at the lock quality. Part two of the GPS data analysis is still to come, but part one can be found here.

Posted by Martyn Posted in: Tech Demo No Comments » August 2007

Further GPS Results - Part 1

Have managed to crunch a little more data from the Copehill Down visit. This is roughly a third the data we collected during the hour we were allowed to walk around and explore. The first third of the data is not of use as we were testing other things, but this (the second third) has a fair few features. First lets start with an overview of the data:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Martyn Posted in: Tech Demo No Comments » August 2007

Video of Copehill Down Event

The army has released a video of the event:

Copehill Down ‘Army News Online’

There is a quick shot of the team at about 47 seconds, from left to right its Martyn, Lewy, Kim, Darren and Isabella (Thales). Unfortunatly John (Thales), the project leader, was sitting to the left of me and is not in shot.

Enjoy

Posted by Martyn Posted in: General News No Comments » July 2007

Initial GPS Testing Results

Here are some initial results from the testing of my GPS system at the Copehill Down kick-off event.

The top row shows the hits from just the GPS system, and the bottom row was when the Differential GPS system had a lock. The only erroneous results look to be in the right hand column, the GPS mode with 7 satellites only has 4 marker points, so not enough to say that it was the best mode. And for some reason the DGPS mode with 7 satellites shows some drift. But as this was in no way scientific in nature, that could be due to people moving around the receiver, or the receiver moving…)

Also note that DGPS with 6 satellites only shows about 10 readings, so that might be whats making DGPS 7 look a bit out.

Posted by Martyn Posted in: Tech Demo No Comments » July 2007

Copehill Down Visit

The MOD officially ‘kicked-off’ the MOD Grand Challenge today with an all day event at the Copehill Down training village on Salisbury Plain. The day started with an introduction to the facility from the Director General for Training Support, Maj. Gen. Cooper. This was followed by a talk from the Ministry of Defence Equipment and Support, Lord Drayson, on outcomes the MOD hopes to achieve though the Grand Challenge and the Competition of Ideas initiative as a whole, and finally with the Chief Scientific Adviser, Prof Sir Roy Anderson, announcing the successful teams.

Following this we were given a House Clearing display; showing various methods of entry employed in the armed forces, as well as a squad with armoured support entering and securing a building. Then after a quick walk to the towns forward command point, we had a hot lunch then went about exploring the village with various equipment to test GPS, Compass and other suitability to the target terrain.

We all found the event to be very enjoyable and came back with enough knowledge to start to analyse the existing platforms suitability and continue working on ideas for navigation and payload delivery.

[A couple of photo’s I took, there are many, many, many more, once we have been though them all, we will be sure to post them here]

Posted by Martyn Posted in: General News No Comments » July 2007

LIDAR Demo

As part of the Universities initial demo to the Thales members of the team, we wanted to visualize the LIDAR scan data in a nice 3D environment. Over the 3 or 4 days before the demo I went about writing some software to do just that. Using the Irrlicht 3D engine and the Lidar interface class developed by Thomas Franklyn I scraped together some software which displayed the data points in ‘close to realtime’.

The software itself is not too useful as it does require too much CPU power to warrant use on the robot itself, but it shows quite clearly the amount of detail available from these units. (btw that me in the second picture trying to get the robot to work; it ran fine in the end, just had the usual pre-demo jitters).

[Thanks to Richard Lewis for the photos]

Posted by Martyn Posted in: Tech Demo No Comments » July 2007

Platform Specification

As it stands there are four robot bases. Three of which were used in last years MEng Grand Challenge, and a fourth with was used as a research platform for a similar project focusing on the LIDAR.

Each of the robots is built around an extruded aluminium frame with differential steering. The motors are taken from wheelchairs so supply ample torque and speed. The motor are controlled by drivers built by a previous student, they are controlled through a CAN bus and are relatively independent in operation; once the acceleration / speed / distance profile is entered they will move in the specified way without any further input.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Martyn Posted in: General News No Comments » July 2007

The MEng Challenge Evolved

For the past 3 years the School of Systems Engineering at Reading University have set undergraduates on the MEng courses the opportunity to take part in the MEng Challenge as their third year project.

The brief for the challenge changed over the years to reflect different hardware and software based problems with progress being tracked by various smaller challenges leading up to the main challenge. The main challenge consisted of the robot having to move unaided between set checkpoints, avoiding obstacles and negotiating the terrain while trying to complete the task in the fastest time.

This year the challenge has morphed into something much bigger, and much more of a challenge. The MOD has launched a competition inviting companies and institutions to take part in a Grand Challenge akin to the DARPA Grand Challenge:

“The challenge is to create a system with a high degree of autonomy that can detect, identify, monitor and report a comprehensive range of military threats in an urban environment. “

Partnered with Thales the university has been tasked with creating an autonomous platform to carry external sensors which will be used to identify threats in an urban environment.

Here is what we have to start with:

There is a lot of work to do, and a team of 10 undergraduates are ready to start work…

Posted by Martyn Posted in: General News No Comments » July 2007