Mike Deffenbaugh

Autonomous Hallway-Driving RC Car


This is the final project for my Microprocessor Interfacing class. Another student and I took an old RC car and modified it to drive autonomously down the hallway. The car wasn't very smart yet when we took this video. Unfortunately the semester ended before we could make significant improvements.

The basic idea was to use three IR proximity sensors to feed information into the processor. The processor would then decide what signal to output to the steering servo and the drive motor. An accelerometer was also used to detect accidental collisions.



Creating a Robotics Kit for Beginners


A grad student that I was working with started a project to design a low-cost robotics kit that could be used to control simple robots like my RC car. The main goal was to build a robotics kit that could be used to teach the basic concepts of robotics. I'm helping to develop the project further. For more information (I did not build the robot in this next video): LowCostRobotics.wordpress.com.




This is an image of the circuit board that I designed for the project. Designing simple circuits is a lot like solving puzzles with several special rules.


After I designed the board I soldered the components on and began testing the board. I wrote an assembly guide along with a programming guide. This guide explains how to use the standard Arduino functions and how to use a few Arduino Libraries that I have written specifically for the newly designed board.

OpenCV | SciKit-Learn


Computer Vision and Machine Learning are both important subjects to know for advanced Robotics. Fortunately other people have written open-source Python Modules for these two subjects that anyone can use.

For a quick introduction to Machine Learning you can visit my page about SciKit - Learn.

For additional Computer Vision content similar to the Sudoku Solver on my home page you can visit my OpenCV page.