The main aim of the project at the moment is to make Bender independent.

This is important for obvious reasons - if he can figure out for himself how to go from A to B then nobody has to tell him.  If he can tell he's running low on battery and go plug himself in, great, effectively he will run forever, but theres a long way to go before that!

Sonar has been on the TODO list for a while with Bender with the idea of allowing a map be created.  A recent assignment at work involved some 3D rendering, and I like the idea of taking ultrasonic data, combining with image data and creating a "GoogleEarthBot"; but thats an aside.  With independence, and hence mapping a main objective at the moment a few purchases have been made, see this blog post here, rather than sit on my arse, I've buckled down and started implementing a mapping app.

Four of these Ultrasonic detectors

were hooked up to a Raspberry Pi and a test Android app was written to see if a map could be produced.

Unfortunately for some reason the RPi malfunctioned, probably due to the ultrasonic detectors sending an input voltage of 5V when the RPi can only deal with 3.3V at most, so will have to look into getting a small board with some resistors attached such that these detectors can be safely used alongside the RPi.

Until this can be achieved tho, the Android app was tested to ensure the sensible data was being output, code will follow soon, but in the meantime, heres some nice screenshots:

Independence Purchases

So with the aim of making Bender - what the robot is called independent the following have been purchased:

A 3-axis gyroscope with 3 axis accelerometer like the one found here:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11486

The aim of this is that Bender should be able to determine his position.

In addition to the above a Position Controller kit - basically an optical encoder with microprocessor attached that can be instructed to move so far etc and take the legwork out of thee computation for me.

http://www.active-robots.com/position-controller-kit

Will post an update once I've had time to play and figure them out...hopefully no polar coordinates!

Pan and Tilt

So without exact proof that the camera code is working - keep getting an exception after several images are passed to it - thankfully the same error each time, I went out and bought a pan and tilt bracket set:

Need to figure out how serovs work now...

Proof of concept

So got basic functionality working....

Need to get the controls working such that I have duel video input.

So being 30 today and feeling like I've achieved nothing...figured I'd try and make a robot that can do everything to grow vegetables autonomously...
Ultimately I want to be able to make a robot for less than 1000$ that will be able to:

1. Prepare land for growing food
2. Sow seeds for growing particular crops
3. Organically raise those crops by mechanically removing weeds etc, 
4. Monitor the condition of the crops and land
5. Harvest the crops sown

The first step of the project is to develop a low cost robot capable of autonomous movement....check back for updates