I am currently taking EECS 467 as my capstone class, in which we are required to submit a final project based on an autonomous robot. Our project is a search-and-rescue robot with two goals: to navigate hazardous obstacles and identify fires via autonomous exploration, and to identify signs of life and safely guide them to an exit. Using images generated by cameras is integral to our project, both to map and navigate the surroundings, as well as detect traces of life. In order to do this, we need to be able to properly and securely mount the cameras on our bot.
We are building our robot off of the base MBot provided to us in the robotics lab, which comes with a camera stand for the pre-installed camera. We are using both a depth camera and an infrared thermal sensor camera, which we want to place on top of each other to align the fields of view as much as possible. Since the current camera mount isn’t big enough to fit both cameras in the correct orientation, we decided to make one ourselves. We considered hot-gluing the cameras to the current mount and fixing them onto blocks of wood, but in the end, decided that our best bet would be to 3D print our own that would provide the maximum security (we didn’t want to take any risks to damage the expensive equipment!)
I first started by creating a base shape similar to that of the existing camera mount in CAD. Looking up the dimensions of each camera, I created cutouts for where each camera would be screwed on, as well as thread soldered wires through. The base also has two holes where it can be attached to the robot.
All there is left to do is to mount the cameras on the robot and we can continue on with the rest of our project!