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Laser Steering

 Download the Laser Steering robofile.

  1. First double click on the WowWee module in the processing pipeline. It may take a while to appear since it will immediately try to connect to the default Rovio setting at 192.168.1.10. When it does appear change the IP address to the one you are using. If you do not know the IP address of the robot you will have to check your router information.

    If you have already configured the Rovio in a previous robofile then the IP address should already be configured for your robot assuming the "Remember as default" in the Rovio GUI interface is set.

  2. Once you get the right IP address you should see the image from the Rovio in the main RoboRealm GUI but it will mainly be a very dark image. This will be darker than normal as this robofile will configure the Rovio to reduce the amount of light in the image. The reason for this is that once a laser light appears in the image it will be the brightest spot in the image. Try this out by using a laser pointer in the field of view of the camera. You will see the point moving in the Rovio image as the robot starts to respond to the location of the laser light. Note that as the Rovio's camera is by default horizontal to the floor you will need to shine the laser light on an apposing wall. Keep in mind that the camera will not pick up a very faint laser light so test this out on a wall not too far from where the Rovio's camera is pointing.

  3. The behavior is created by monitoring the X and Y coordinate of the laser light in the Rovio's camera. If the point is higher than the middle of the image, the robot moves forward, if it is lower the robot moves backwards. Likewise, if the point is on the extreme right or left the robot will shift to that location.

    All of this logic is performed in the VBScript module which decides how to populate the 'move' variable in reponse to where the laser point is detected. Note that this information comes from the Laser Spot detection module.


  4. Once the 'move' variable is set the Rovio module then grabs this value and passes it to the Rovio robot to complete the cycle.