6. Cliff Detection

Let us give PiCar-X a little self-protection awareness and let it learn to use its own grayscale module to avoid rushing down the cliff.

In this example, the car will be dormant. If you push it to a cliff, it will be awakened urgently, then back up, and say “danger”.

Run the Code

cd ~/picar-x/example
sudo python3 6.cliff_detection.py

Code

Note

You can Modify/Reset/Copy/Run/Stop the code below. But before that, you need to go to source code path like picar-x/example. After modifying the code, you can run it directly to see the effect.

from picarx import Picarx
from time import sleep
from robot_hat import TTS

tts = TTS()
tts.lang("en-US")

px = Picarx()
# px = Picarx(grayscale_pins=['A0', 'A1', 'A2'])
# manual modify reference value
px.set_cliff_reference([200, 200, 200])

current_state = None
px_power = 10
offset = 20
last_state = "safe"

if __name__=='__main__':
    try:
        while True:
            gm_val_list = px.get_grayscale_data()
            gm_state = px.get_cliff_status(gm_val_list)
            # print("cliff status is:  %s"%gm_state)

            if gm_state is False:
                state = "safe"
                px.stop()
            else:
                state = "danger"
                px.backward(80)
                if last_state == "safe":
                    tts.say("danger")
                    sleep(0.1)
            last_state = state

    finally:
        px.stop()
        print("stop and exit")
        sleep(0.1)

How it works?

The function to detect the cliff looks like this:

• get_grayscale_data(): This method directly outputs the readings of the three sensors, from right to left. The brighter the area, the larger the value obtained.

• get_cliff_status(gm_val_list): This method compares the readings from the three probes and outputs a result. If the result is true, it is detected that there is a cliff in front of the car.