Field Testing

Controller Configuration

One of the first testing methods investigated was the remote control operation with the available joystick controller.

In Arduino: buttons[] is a vector of the whole list of button indexes and the numbers in the map below correspond to each index

Ipega Extendable Controller Button Indexes

Test Drive

A short clip of a test drive trial is listed below. During this test drive, the controller was used with the tank. The objective of this trial was to determine if the tank could travel in a straight line when compared to a tape measure. As pictured in the video, the tank was not able to travel in a straight direction. The Sabertooth motor controller splits the same amount of power to two motors, but the two motors have different levels of internal resistance, which resulted in outputting different amounts of speed when provided the same amount of input. This is what caused the tank to not be able to travel in a straight direction.

24MB

IMG_2008.MOV

Open

Test driving tank using controller to determine if it can stay on a straight path.

Process to Run Program:

1. Run command roscore in a new terminal.

2. Connect bluetooth controller with Home+X buttons (make sure it has enough battery).

3. Run command rosrun joy joy_node in new terminal.

4. Open Arduino IDE Compile TankStyleSweepWithJoystick script to reflect any changes.

5. Run command rosrun rosserial_python serial_node.py /dev/ttyACM1 _baud:=9600 in a new terminal.

6. Test joystick inputs.