Scouting Robot on Ubuntu and Node.js

During their qualification work, a group of university staff assembled a model of a robot designed to work in dangerous conditions, such as military actions or disaster sites. The most curious thing here, rather, is not the fact of the presence of such a robot - there is already enough of this - but the fact that the robot is controlled by a computer with Ubuntu installed, while the ability of the robot manipulators to perform asynchronous operations is provided by Node.js.

The appearance of the device can be easily assessed in the photograph, and its technical specifications are as follows:

• Wireless control of the robot via WiFi; the robot has a built-in router, the range of which is 1 km is provided by two amplifiers
• Length 101 cm, width 71 cm, height 40 cm, weight about 68 kg
• Aluminium case
• Work time about 12 hours
• Built-in camera with microphone and night vision
• GPS

How the robot moves is shown in the video below:


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Among the designers of the robot was a web developer familiar with Node.js. Without further ado, he installed the Node.js web server on an EEE PC with Ubuntu, wrote an interface for remote control of the robot from the control panel, citing the fact that "it will work almost everywhere." Here is the initialization of the initial parameters of the state of the robot:

var config = { // motor_serial: '/dev/cu.usbserial-A600cJpP', // gps_serial: '/dev/cu.usbserial-A40111OI', // motor_on: false, // gps_on: false, // scrape_ddwrt: true motor_serial: "/dev/serial/by-id/usb-FTDI_FT232R_USB_UART_A600cJpP-if00-port0", gps_serial: '/dev/serial/by-id/usb-FTDI_FT232R_USB_UART_A40111OI-if00-port0', motor_on: true, gps_on: false, scrape_ddwrt: true }; 

The robot itself is recognized as the creator of a toy, created for university purposes, but with some refinement, it may well serve serious tasks.

The source code of the JS interface for controlling the robot is available on GitHub .

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