Beach Cleaning Robot Blog

Regulation, RC car still dead, first UI sketch.

Date: 2021-01-16
Author: Andrew

Another project that I'm working on involves a High Altitude Balloon (you can see progress on that one on this website https://melbourne-rpi.com.au/hab/. We have to deal with the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) to get approval to launch our balloons and it occurred to me that we might have to deal with the same situation with local, state or commonwealth legislation and/or regulation for teh BeachBot.

Clearly, with drones CASA has limitations for any drone let alone a UAV. With autonomous cars there are road and licensing restrictions. The project is not bigger than a 30cm radio controlled (RC) car at the moment and we are going to limit the speed to under walking pace so we can catch it if there's a malfunction. From a safety perspective we plan to add a kill switch to immediately stop the vehicle as well just in case. But as the project evolves we'd like it to move faster and it's likely to get bulkier and heavier. I posed the question on the Australian Robotics and Automation Association Slack to see if anyone else knows.

Went looking for the RC car charger without any luck. I have some boxes in storage which I'm going to look at tomorrow otherwise I'll be having to buy one. Disorganisation has costs :(

Had a spare moment so sketched out the first version of the UI design for the web interface to control V3. Should be pretty simple to code up most of it. There are a few bits that might be a bit tricky - the combined steering and throttle control is one of them. Need to run it by Rohan and get his ideas.