Abstract
The purpose of this Capstone Project is to build a PiCar that can go to a specific spot to trace and take photos of specific target animals or plants. This allows the users to observe some of their daily activities. The car should be able to do pathfinding with a given location and a map according to the GPS. ROS on the Raspberry Pi 4b was used to communicate with different sensors on the car. We used the Proportional–integral–derivative controller (PID) control on the z-axis of the accelerometer to make the car run straight. The GPS is used to locate the car and tell it when to stop. There is a video stream available at all times on a cloud server; the animals in the stream video can be recognized and the video with the recognition by machine learning will be updated on the observer website. Our PiCar can run in a straight line but cannot turn accurately as the GPS is not very precise. In the future, we would add edge detection to tell the car that it is the end of the road and time to turn. The object detection function works perfectly.
Authors
Sicheng Yang
Mckelvey School of Engineering
Washington University in St. Louis
St. Louis, Missouri
BS & MS in Computer Engineering
sicheng@wustl.edu
Mingkang You
Mckelvey School of Engineering
Washington University in St. Louis
St. Louis, Missouri
BS & MS in Electrical Engineering
mingkang@wustl.edu
Lily Fu
Mckelvey School of Engineering
Washington University in St. Louis
St. Louis, Missouri
BS & MS in Computer Engineering
f.yanqing@wustl.edu
Advisor
Jim Feher, Ph.D., P.E.
jdfeher@wustl.edu
Professor of Practice, Electrical & Systems Engineering
Director of ESE Masters’ Studies
Washington University in St. Louis
Result
First, we accomplished a functional PiCar which has a functional motor, steer servo, accelerometer, magnetometer, GPS, camera, and lidar.
Second, our AWS server is able to receive photos from PiCar and recognize stop signs in it. The observer’s website for the user can see the coordinate of the stop sign and camera live stream.
Third, our PiCar is able to run in a straight line between any two points according to the instructions from the GPS. It can also make a perfect turn.
The Link of the result video can be found in the link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13r-tQZqGEb8dMg-0ELs7C98q_8ybv9SI?usp=drive_link
The essay can be found in the link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18LsH_vlbw3_ioMRNHaYMJheTgGKXSAiAnVaWUPNqoms
GitHub: