The basic prototype worked on the bench, but as I built it on to the chassis, it started to have issues. The magnetometer would give very random and unreliable readings. I kind of assumed I’ve get some interference, but this was reading north sometimes 180 degree out. In addition, the reading changed when the motors ran and the servos moved. I assumed I was getting magnetic flux from the motors and servos, and this was interfering with the magnetometer. However, without the motors running, I was also getting bad drift from the magnetometer. For example, I would point the car north, take a magnetometer reading, then rotate the car 360 degrees, the reading wouldn’t give me a 360 change. When I get back to north I would read 280 odd degrees, in addition, if I did the same experiment in different places in the room, or at different times, I got different readings. The magnetometer be useless if I couldn’t reliably know where “north” was.

The xBee also had issues, and seemed to only work up to about 1-2m away … which wasn’t very useful. I only had 1mW series 1 devices, which on the data sheet said they’d get 600m, so I expected a bit better than 2m, but I assume this was also due to interference. This wasn’t a deal breaker, as most of the testing could be done with the car no actually driving. All the debugging was around the steering, so 2m was fine to just not have a cable in the way. But it was frustrating … I had to follow the car around carrying the laptop, instead of just sitting in the garden at a table and taking reading as it drove around.

I stuck with the xBee but I moved the magnetometer away from the main board and chassis, to try and reduce the interference. I assumed the interference was magnetic flux coming from the huge brushless motor and large powerful steering servo in the car. If I mounted the magnetometer away from these, perhaps I’d get a more reliable reading. And so was born “broom-handle-bot”

SparkFun AVC 2013 autonomous robot

While working on the prototype I was also researching better GPS solutions. The basic GPS module I was using only had an accuracy of about 2-5m. This would be tricky to avoid a barrel or hit a jump 1m wide. I had stumbled across SBAS while research GPS issues and this potentially could give me accuracy down to 1-2m. Much better. You can read the wiki page for more details, but effectively (IIUIC) the SBAS system sends a separate signal from a different set of satellites that contains data to improve the accuracy of the main GPS signal. It compensates for atmospheric interface, and other transmission errors. There are different SBAS systems in different parts of the world, WAAS in North America and GLONASS in Europe. I would need a GPS receiver that supported both. Again, with some googling, I found NaviLock and the NL-622MP MD6 GPS Receiver. The data sheet confirmed it supported WAAS and GLONASS, it uses the latest u-Blox chipset, and came in a handy mountable self-contained puck. I ordered one and it arrived. The only downside was the output was RS232 (+/- 15v) not TTL, so I’d need a level shifter board to connect it to the mBed. If I had spent more time looking, they do do a TTL version, which would have been easier …

The very first test of the new GPS puck was transformational. The old GPS wouldn’t get a lock inside my house, which made testing a real pain. I would have to write the code, upload it, then disconnect the system, walk outside in to the garden, test it in the cold, then come back in and debug it, then repeat. This wouldn’t have been so bad, if this was on a Sunday afternoon, but due to my job and family commitments, nearly all my tinkering was done at night, between the hours of 10pm and 2am. It was also the back end of winter, and still snowy some weekend. Testing in the garden at midnight in the snow wasn’t fun.
The new GPS got a lock inside. Plus it got a lock really quickly, within seconds. The old GPS took minutes. It was clear from the first few outside tests that the accuracy was much better and the reading more stable. The GPS used the uBlox 6 chipset, with came with a very detailed and advance desktop config and debug utility.

The basic system was working. However I still had magnetometer issues. The reading would vary wildly if the magnetometer was close to the car. Even if it was some distance way, it wasn’t reliable. It would point north, then I would rotate it 180 and it wouldn’t point S, it would read 160 degrees, then I point it north again and it would read -30. If I rotated it 360 degrees sometimes it didn’t move, sometimes it rotated 250 degrees. I tried lots of different configurations. Even on the bench with no magnets or metal close it wasn’t reliable.
After some extensive Googling, it seemed I need to perform a calibration. This would calibrate out basic interference if the interference was constant, like a steel mounting screw that was always in the same relative position to the sensor. This link explains the process. You take lots of readings from every orientation, imaging mounting the sensor on gimbals and spinning it on all axis, so the tip of the sensor scribes the outline of a sphere. Ideally you want a data cloud of points in all orientations from all three sensors; x, y & z.
Once you have the data set you need to do three things;

1. You need to remove “erroneous” readings, called outliners. There are clearly (statistically) incorrect. These are obvious to spot manually as the sit outside the circle/sphere of normal readings.
2. You need to normalise the data in all three axis, so all the maximum readings from all the of the x, y & z sensors have the same magnitude
3. You need to shift the data so to each set of readings is centred on zero.

Imagine a point cloud that is slightly oval shaped. The normalisation process shifts and scales the cloud so it’s a perfect circle, orgined around zero.These scaling and offset numbers are then used to scale the raw reading to give better accuracy.

Compass Calibration – Before

Compass Calibration – After

This worked to an extent, and the magnetometer was noticeably more accurate and stable, but I still had problems. So I thought I’d tried a different approach. I had an IMU sensor from a previous project. This sensor has 9 DoF (gyro, accelerometer & magnetometer) plus a CPU and contains a kalman filter to process the data. It will give Euler angles, and all I was after was “yaw” – Phi. The issue was the device was not I2C, but serial or SPI. The serial interface had complex packet structure and I didn’t have time to write and debug a parser, so I opted for SPI. I modified the code to read SPI and got a basic Phi reading from the device.
This was more accurate. But it now had a different problem. The issue with yaw calculating with a 9 DoF board, is the yaw cannot use the accelerometer data, as it rotates around the accelerometer axis so it never changes. It can only merge the magnetometer and gyro data. And this is susceptible to gyro drift. This manifested itself in the yaw reading slowing rotating even when the unit was stationary. There was a function in the devices to zero the gyros when the unit was at a known stationary position, but after time the drift returned. That clearly wasn’t going to work.

The final option was to try the same basic magnetometer code, but with these IMU magnetometer readings. You can read all the raw gyro, accelerometer, magnetometer readings, plus the processed (filtered) version, plus the Euler angles from the device.
It turned out the process (filtered) raw magnetometer readings were pretty stable. So I had my final solution. However … about a week before the competition!

Other posts in this series :

• AVC – It’s ready !
• AVC – How difficult can it be ?
• AVC – Switching from Arduino to mBed
• AVC – Problems
• AVC – First test run
• AVC – Competition Day