Remote Control Robot Car

WINLAB Summer Internship 2022

Group Members: Jimmy Huang, John Greaney-Cheng

Project Website

​Remote Control Robot Car Website

Project Objective

Remote control of a robotics platform using video streams. The project will require students to work with video streaming toolkits and develop software to allow for low-latency control of the remote platform from either a first- or third-person view. Students will begin by setting up ROS on a robotics platform at Winlab so that they have a system to work on, with the ultimate goal of testing the remote control system on the hardware developed by the smart car team at the end of the summer.

Students will need to write a ROS node to run on the vehicle platform which will receive remote control commands and translate them into control signals for the platform hardware. Students will also need to work with software such as gstreamer for low-latency streaming of the video feed from the car.

Week 1 Update

​Week 1 Presentation

• Learned how to navigate Linux Command Line and ​Orbit Management Framework
• Installed ​ROS Melodic on sandbox node and began working through ​ROS tutorials
• Met with other groups within the Car Intersection group (Mini Smart Car Hardware Design, Autonomous System Infrastructure, Multi-Cam Fusion for Smart Intersection)

Week 2 Update

​Week 2 Presentation

• Completed the ROS tutorials; Installed ROS on intersection node and ​Pioneer 3-DX
• Completed ​VIMtutor
• Installed ​Real Sense libraries compatible with ROS
• Solved Pioneer 3-DX networking problem and ssh into it through wireless connection

Week 3 Update

​Week 3 Presentation

• Successfully remote controlled Pioneer 3-DX
• Installed ​ROSARIA and ​AriaCoda to get access to libraries compatible with Pioneer 3-DX
• Installed ​Demo Client to control robot
• Streamed video through ​Chrome Remote Desktop

Week 4 Update

​Week 4 Presentation

• Built our own client to control robot (Backed it up on ​Gitlab)
• Wrote Open Loop control program to have Pioneer 3-DX move in square repeatedly to test precision of robot
• Recorded data on a ​bag file, transferred it to a csv file and graphed it

Week 5 Update

​Week 5 Presentation

• Finished writing and collecting data from Open and Closed loop control programs for Pioneer 3-DX Square (drifting of odometry but less so with closed loop)
• Learned different methods of navigation to begin waypoint following program
• Streamed video through ssh tunneling (improves resource allocation and general convenience over Chrome Remote Desktop) via ​ROS Package

Week 6 Update

​Week 6 Presentation

• Implemented waypoint following program through dead reckoning
• Made a Flask v1.1 web server to send commands to Pioneer 3-DX
• Programmed server to receive robot odometry data

Week 7 Update

• Streamed video through ssh tunneling in conjunction with Flask server