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
On the 16th of October 2019, the Australian Federal Police Bomb Response unit was called to the premises of SFX. Fortunately, it wasn’t because there was a threat of a LiPo fire (this time), but they were there to let us play around with get inspiration from some of their robots. The Bomb Response unit...Read More
Hey there, it’s Anthony, ready to bring an end to this epic trilogy of identifying hazmat signs. In this part we will cover how we solved the second half of the generic object detection problem (as detailed in the first part): classification. The algorithms used in this part are by far the most complicated. Rather...Read More
Hi, it’s Anthony again. I’m here to make an addition to the first part of this series, which really belongs in that blog post, but it was getting too long, so I decided to make it into its own. If you haven’t read it, you can read part 1 here: https://www.sfxrescue.com/developmentupdates/day-195-hazmat-part-1-detecting-the-danger/ After a contour has...Read More
Hi, this is Anthony. I’ve not written a blog post about the vision stuff yet because I’ve been too busy actually working on it. The competition is done now though, and so I have free time to talk about what I’ve learned. Basically, there are two parts to the generic object detection problem: detection and...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
Hello, It’s me Barney again! This time I am writing about motors. The S.A.R.T team ran into an issue with the motors constantly overloading and not going to the desired speeds. After a little troubleshooting, the issue was found. The pyax12 library doesn’t support the new MX-12w motors. I decided to replace the library with...Read More
