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| Choosing Sensors for Your Robot (Page 3) |
Choosing Sensors for Your Robot
 06-06-2009 11:27 AM
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| Difficulty: | Beginner to Advanced | ||||||
Other Sensors
Internal Sensors
Gyros and Accelerometers Balancing robots, especially bipeds, can benefit greatly from feedback in the form of gyros and accelerometers. UAVs also often have these sensors. Stall Sensor A stall sensor is nothing more than a current sensor attached to a motor. Temperature A temperature sensor may be important if your bot is fairly weather tight and has a lot of processing power. There are a variety of I2C and serially connected temperature sensors available. The DS1620 is probably the most popular version with robot builders throughout the ages. Other Sensors Cameras We live in a visual world. Yet, I've neglected to mention cameras up until the end, primarily because they rarely have a place on small robots. There are a variety of cameras on the market, if your bot has an onboard computer. You can just use a webcam, or firewire camera. The software for your bot's "vision" is the tough part. If you are using a microcontroller, you won't have enough processing power to do much vision. Something like the CMUCam or AVRCam may do the job. Each is a small camera with it's own processor that does color blob tracking. Both sensors send out X,Y data for blobs they detect and have simple serial interfaces. The added bonus with the AVRCam is that it is entirely open source. Heat Sensors Pyroelectric sensors can detect movement of heat. Low-cost versions can be found in motion detectors in old home alarms. Parallax sells a $10 version like these motion detectors -- however it needs to stabilize for at least 2-3 seconds before it's readings are good. If you want to be able to track people in real time, you will want a sensor like the Eltec E442-3 (Available from acroname for about $90). The Eltec sensor has a much faster update rate, it can detect when you wave your hand in front of it. Another possibility is a thermopile. This is a much more advanced sensor that actually returns a reading of how hot a particular area is, without contact with the area. The TPA-81 thermopile has an 8x1 array of thermo pixels, and can detect a heat source like a candle up to 6 feet away. UVTron UV light may not seem like a common thing you want to detect, unless you are building a fire fighting robot. The UVTron uses some complex circuitry to charge a bulb that detects UV. The sensor then outputs short pulses when it detects UV light. Because the pulses are short, this sensor typically requires an interrupt driven routine.
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