Java Controlled RC Car
Children and teenagers today like to play with remote- controlled cars—watching them move, speed up, slow down, and change direction at the mere press of a button. They have been around for quite some time now, but the newer makes show considerable improvement over the older ones. The latter were controlled by radio, whereas those of today are more likely to be operated by a system that uses a computer language of some of some sort, such as Visual Basic. Many of the most recently made RC cars are controlled using Java—the computer language commonly used in creating multimedia items to be embedded in webpages. One maker, who has made many videos of his cars and posted them on YouTube, operates a website called “Let ’s Make Robots;” and he is experimenting on a number of new ideas he has. Among these are the integration of the GPS satellite subsystem (developing GPS navigation) and Google Earth Support; improving the autonomous subsystem; and researching Kalman Filter in order to build a sensor fusion.