About COMRADE

COMRADE stands for Co-Operative Mobile Robots for Autonomous Decisive Exploration. It involves construction of two autonomous robots, named Eve and Adam. EVE will be a differentially steered vehicle with an onboard robotic gripper with three degrees of freedom. ADAM will be a similar vehicle without a robotic arm. They will be equipped with an onboard Simputer each for robot logic control and image processing. They will communicate with each other using 802.11b (wireless LAN).

Click on the thumbnail to see an overview of the project mission.

The vehicle

The vehicle chassis is an aluminium framework designed to be robust and strong enough to negotiate rough terrain, house the robotic arm and carry payloads when required. The onboard power source is a 12V, 32Ah car battery enough to power the vehicle for atleast one hour. The vehicle has a top speed of 50cm/s. Differential steering allows increased maneuverabilty. The robotic gripper, which is an articulated robotic arm will have five degrees of freedom.

Software and control

The onboard low level control is provided by a microcontroller from the AVR series along with the associated driver circuitry. The low level control is provided by a microcontroller from the AVR series. The tasks to be handled by the microcontroller include actuator control, monitoring of feedback data from encoders and the triggering and control of the SONAR range finders. The control information for the microcontroller board is provided by the Simputer through a serial link. The Simputer uses the StrongARM SA-1110 processor which provides a speed equivalent to that of a 400 Mhz Celeron. The Simputer handles image processing, obstacle avoidance and wireless LAN communication with other robots.

Click on the thumbnail to see a block diagram of the robot electronics.

Sensors