Our PhiloBot has been launched by our colleague Dr. Danny Schlüns, who started his career at Philotech in Landshut as an intern.
Basically it is a modell car (Sunfounder Smart Video Car) equipped with a 720p USB webcam. Central unit of the vehicle is a Raspberry Pi with Ubuntu Mate as operation system. The intention is, to create an autonomous driving car.
Our new colleague Christian Moll just finished his master thesis in the field of autonomous driving in our office in Landshut.
The PhiloBot already moves continuously forwards and backwards instead of step by step as in the basic implementation. It also has an autonomous acceleration depending on how fast the Carrera-track allows it to drive.
On the left side you can see the PT1-controlled steering according to information extracted from camera pictures. Therefore Christian also developed an human interface showing this information.
The programming is done in C++ using the Open-Source software Robot Operation System (ROS) and OpenCV.
Stay tuned to learn more about the PhiloBot in the future.