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[Academic] Using Unity for Robotics and Micro Controllers projects

Discussion in 'Made With Unity' started by Elixir, Aug 7, 2016.

  1. Elixir

    Elixir

    Joined:
    Nov 30, 2013
    Posts:
    2
    I'm Elías Barroeta, member of HyperBerry Games (the studio behind Otem's Defiance), I'm a student of Electronics and Computer engineering at Yacambú University (Barquisimeto city in Lara state in Venezuela) On the second trimester of 2016 I was coursing two of the most interesting subjects: "Robotics" and "Applications With Micro Controllers" and for the final projects of these two courses we had to build actual robots.

    The robots were made in groups by all the students of the course but my personal task was to create the User Interface for the users to control these robots and I decided to use Unity for this to achieve a visually pleasant result with a better representation of what the robots were doing in reality when the users gave them commands trough the interface.

    The Robotics project was a gardener robot and the Micro Controllers robot was a mobile rover equipped with a wide array of sensors. Both softwares were able to send and receive commands to their robots via serial port using a wireless xBee module and those orders were processed and executed by PIC18F4550 micro controllers.

    The gardening robot software helped it perform planting and watering routines by sending the required commands in order to execute those tasks, also, the software kept track of the time at which plant needed to be watered.

    The rover had two moving modes, manual and automatic, on the manual mode it had 3 basic commands, turn 90° to each side and forwards; each time the robot made a successful move, the software would keep track of the explored area and when a nice chunk of area was already registered the users could command the rover to move to a previously explored zone and the software would find the best route using A* path finding algorithm and then the rover would follow the route step by step with it's 3 basic moving commands.

    Here´s a VIDEO of the Rover Software in action:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwvWIIXC0fVWMk1JVm1qZEs4bWc/view?usp=sharing

    In conclusion, never underestimate the power of Unity for academic work ;)

    Thanks for reading, here are some images.

    - The Rover:
    Rover.jpeg

    - The Gardening program:
    RoboticaUnity.PNG

    - The Gardening Robot:
    RobotAgricultor.jpeg
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2016