Robo-blog

User Interface with Processing, Part 2

I’ve been playing around with various control interfaces via processing, but it occurred to me I hadn’t posted anything in a while, so here’s a work in progress… at first I tried to create a mouse based steering system that would read the position within an on-screen disc and power the motors as appropriate, but it turned out to be very twitchy. So for now I’m using a direct representation of the power to each motor in the differential drive system; this might be a bit less intuitive for the user, but it has the advantage of freeing up the mouse for other tasks. In particular, I’ve set up control of the pan/tilt unit – and hence the camera – via mouselook, which should be familiar to anyone who’s played a few first person videogames. The LEDs can also be toggled by keyboard, and a few sound effects can be triggered- making sure the file definitely played, but only once meant paying a bit more attention to the way the processing and MySimpleRobot layers interact, but proved simple enough to implement.

(Video also available in High Def)

Future additions? Some visualisation of the rangefinder reading, of course, and perhaps some stock routines like object tracking, drive until obstacle etc. Ideally (and with some more sensors) I’d like it to check the sanity of the user commands, rather than cheerfully charging into walls or off tables, which’d require careful analysis of requested motor values. The interface itself obviously also needs some work; it’s hardly user friendly at the moment, as even I couldn’t quite remember the appropriate keystrokes when putting together the video!