1. Wireless Autonomous Trolley
Randy Baron
Phillip Hoang
ECE 492
Winter 2017
Hello and welcome
We are group 7 and this is our Capstone project

2. Motivation
Our basic reason for choosing to pursue this project was the simple idea that we wanted to make a robot.
Further brainstorming about what we wanted to make led us to the idea of something that can be used carry something from point A to point B
Started with forklift

3. Overview Two modes: Autonomous
Looks for coloured objects and moves to them
Remote Control
User provides movement commands
Commands are sent over a simple and portable wireless interface
The WAT has 2 modes of operation, autonomous mode, and remote controlled mode.
In Autonomous mode, the user specifies what points the robot will go to and in what order. These points are differentiated by colour.
In Remote Control mode, the WAT can be controlled like a remote controlled car.
In either mode, commands are sent via a Wifi interface so the WAT can be controlled by any device with WiFi like your laptop or your smartphone.

4. Process Flow Here is how all the main components interact.
The user sends a command via WiFi, the WiFi forwards this command to the main board
In RC mode, the main board will tell the motor driver to move the motors
Otherwise, it will tell the camera to take a picture to find out where to go and then do tell the motor driver to move

5. Autonomous
Trolley can seek out multiple markers in the specified order.
The markers are coloured objects
In autonomous mode, you’ll be able to specify points for the robot to go to.
For our demonstration today, we are using balloons, but if you wanted to use the WAT at home, you could stick coloured paper on your walls.
Also for demonstration purposes, the WAT can only got to 3 points that must be specified in order, but in a future iteration, we would have it so
You could program routes into the WAT so you could go to through multiple points with one instruction.

6. Autonomous This is what the robot sees...
After taking a picture the image will be passed into the image processing algorithm we have developed. It will look for a continuous region of the specified colour and once done...

7. Autonomous This is what the robot sees… and that is what it found
Note how it ignores the ugly noise in the image to find the marker. The position of the region is then turned into movement info for the motors. If nothing is found then the robot will turn until the marker is sighted.

8. Remote Control User gives commands with this simple interface
Here is the RC mode web page.
When you push a button, the robot will move accordingly.

9. Components Altera DE0 Nano FPGA Board uCam-II Serial Camera
ESP-8266 WiFi Module
Infrared Proximity Sensor
Buttons and LED
4 Motors and Motor Driver
3 DCDC Converters
6 AA batteries
The prototype cost us just under $160 to produce (ignoring provided materials)

10. ?