Who are we ?
This is a blog created by the cooperative robotics team of the Fontys Adaptive Robotics minor.Here we will post information about our progress and other interesting information about adaptive and cooperative robotics.
Our team is composed of 5 team members: Ion Iuncu, David Heurtaux, Stan Verbeek, Jasper Mulder and Luc Ahrens. Our goal is to create new study material for the next students who are going to follow this minor and share our experience with working on our final project.
The goal of the project
The goal is to deliver 3 mobile robot platforms which are programmed to cooperatively build a map of an unknown environment. These robots need to be outfitted with the necessary sensors to be able to map the environment, determine their own locations and identify objects in a way that it can be recognized by humans. The robots should preferably behave in a structured and smart manner to efficiently create a map. It is not necessary for the robot to navigate through debris. All data needs to be sent back to an overview station.
To achieve this goal, the project team will build a software network in Robot Operating System (ROS), version Indigo. ROS only works in the Linux operating system, in this case Linux Ubuntu version 14.04.
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To achieve this goal, the project team will build a software network in Robot Operating System (ROS), version Indigo. ROS only works in the Linux operating system, in this case Linux Ubuntu version 14.04.
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Progress
This topic shows the progress we are making each week. If you are interested on the details, please look for the blog post on that topic.
2016-06-09
Make use-case diagram, hardware alterations, further work on safety
2016-06-02
Test Raspberry Pi performance, make internal block diagram, have one robot operational
2016-05-26
Week ten: make alterations to motor drivers, hardware architecture block devision diagram, Raspberry Pi operational, put laser in simulation, continued work on safety.
2016-05-19
2016-04-28
2016-06-09
Make use-case diagram, hardware alterations, further work on safety
2016-06-02
Test Raspberry Pi performance, make internal block diagram, have one robot operational
2016-05-26
Week ten: make alterations to motor drivers, hardware architecture block devision diagram, Raspberry Pi operational, put laser in simulation, continued work on safety.
2016-05-19
Week nine: continued work on safety and started building three rosbee robot sets, while improving its software.
2016-05-12
Week eight: continued work on safety and successful pathfinding of one robot
2016-05-05
Week seven: started working on safety and increasing number of robots for map merging (3+ robots)
2016-04-28
Week six: successful map merging in a 2D environment as wel as choosing sensor hardware (laser scanner and 3D camera)
2016-04-21
Week five: continued work on map merging in a 2D environment.
2016-04-14
In week four we continued implementing software and doing research in Ad-Hoc communication to support this progress.
2016-04-07
In the third week of the project we did some more in-depth research on some of the more interesting findings of the first two weeks that will be used a lot during the project:
- Gazebo (3D simulation environment)
- STRD (2D simulation environment)
- Map merging algorithms
- Exploration algorithms
We also started testing and implementing software in ROS. Tutorials are included in the representing blog posts.
2016-03-31
The first two weeks of the project were about doing research on topics that we will or might come across:
- C-SLAM (Cooperative Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping)
- Odometry
- Simulation Environments
- Sensors