Robot Follows The Rules Of The Road

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6R0wO1o01g]

This is a fantastic high school project. [Shmendrik213] built and robot a programmed it to follow common traffic rules. The robot drives itself with a DC motor, using one servo for steering and another to pan a webcam back and forth. The netbook that comes along for the ride is running a VB.NET program that can detect an upcoming intersection, read the street sign, and react based on other cars currently at the intersection.

The hardware is running on an Altera processor using firmware programmed in VHDL. We remember building a tissue box holder for one of our high school projects. Looks like the times have changed since then.

15 thoughts on “Robot Follows The Rules Of The Road

  1. eewwww VB.NET and vhdl. Those are my two least favorite languages.

    Interesting project, I wish they had a few more details and not just a video. It’d be nice to know what kind of software they were using to do the vision (which is probably the hard part here)

  2. A High School project? Thank gawd…there ARE still intelligent kids out there who aren’t cracked out on Twitter, video games and Tommy Hilfiger (or whatever redundant crap they’re into these days…) ;p

    Way to go Shmendrik! I expect we’ll be seeing much more of you in the near future!

  3. It stopped at a yield sign even though crossing traffic had a stop sign, and hadn’t even reached it yet.

    It stayed stopped, even though it had the right of way to proceed.

    It stayed stopped an addition 40 seconds even though there were no cars.

    Had this been an actual driving situation, the robot would have been beaten to death with a tire iron that the driver stuck behind it would have had ample time to search for in his trunk.

    I like the idea, but the only rule it seems to know is “Look both ways before crossing the street”

  4. @ChalkBored

    Glad I’m not the only one that noticed. Also shown, is that it scans the intersection for cars. If it finds one, it will start all over again. So it seems more like it will only go if there aren’t any other cars.

    Seems like a great start, but the analysis certainly needs to be sped up for practicality.

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