Authors: Connor Kneebone, Alexander Cavalli, Jack Williams, Matthew Williams, Graham Stock, Charlotte Drury, Anthony Gambale, Michael Cavalli, Nathaniel Kneebone, Martin Hosking, Alexander Thorning Published: 20th of March, 2020 Abstract The Semi-Autonomous Rescue Team (herein known as the S.A.R.T.) is a group of STEM enthusiasts originally formed in early 2015 with the intent of developing and...Read More

The wheels we made for the Mark III robot did pretty well. The new polyurethane tires were excellent, they had plenty of grip, were basically indestructible and they maintained their grip over many hours of use. The hubs worked pretty well… well, most of the time. Apart from the structural issues due to low infill...Read More

A brief history of two-way audio In previous years, we have used a few methods to do two-way audio. Initially we had a speech to text and back again system to transmit data. Needless to say, this was quite limiting and not particularly… well, good. This was replaced in 2018 with Mumble, a basic VoIP...Read More

Here at S.A.R.T. we are proud to announce the release… of SIGHTS. No, it’s not a network of spy satellites. We aggressively forced the name for that sweet secret service-style acronym. It stands for “SART Integrated GUI and Host Teleoperation Service”, and that’s just what it is: A complete teleoperation interface written by the Semi-Autonomous Rescue...Read More

Unfortunately the Nvidia Jetson doesn’t support the Intel 9260 cards out of the box. Nvidia’s JetPack OS ships with the Linux kernel 4.9 while support for these cards was added in the newer 4.14. However, there’s a workaround, but we gotta recompile the kernel modules. Without further ado, here’s how to get the Intel 9260...Read More

Authors: Connor Kneebone, Alexander Cavalli, Graham Stock, Charlotte Drury, Anthony Gambale, Michael Cavalli, Nathaniel Kneebone, Martin Hosking Published: 19th of June, 2019 License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Open in New Tab This browser does not support inline PDFs. Please download the PDF to view it: Download PDFRead More

In a previous blog post, I wrote about using the official Arduino IDE with the on-board Arduino 101 on the UDOO x86 Ultra. Since our robot is headless, i.e. doesn’t run a display server, we wanted the IDE to run from the command line. While the IDE had support for using its functionality from the...Read More

Authors: Connor Kneebone, Matthew Williams, Jack Williams, Alexander Cavalli, Aaron Maggs, Ryan Ewyk, Riley Cockerill, Michael Cavalli, Charlotte Drury, Graham Stock, Ryan Millard-Cartwright Published: 17th of March, 2019 Abstract The Semi-Autonomous Rescue Team (herein known as the S.A.R.T.) is a group of STEM enthusiasts formed in late 2015 with the intent of developing and creating...Read More

An issue we’ve commonly faced while operating our robot is that the servos will keep spinning if the script crashes or if we exit the script via CTRL+C. I’ve always had the stop_servos.py script for this exact purpose but it has to be executed manually after exiting the main script, i.e. python3 stop_servos.py. This script...Read More

Now that we have a rather nice PID controller, it’s time to test it! Enjoy responsibly Using just a PID controller alone, we can implement rudimentary autonomy. It’s only basic, but it’s a start and it’s the first time our robot has ever completed a course unaided. Another video, showcasing it from a different angle...Read More