Mobile Robot Control 2021 Group 4

Group Members

Luuk Verstegen - 1252488

Bob Bindels - 1246348

Stijn van den Broek - 1252011

Lars van Dooren - 1249169

Tjeerd Ickenroth - 1232296

Introduction

This Wiki-page reports the progress made by Group 1 towards completion of the Escape Room Challenge and the Hospital Challenge. The goal of the Escape Room Challenge is to escape a rectangular room as fast as possible without bumping into walls. The goal of the Hospital Challenge is to deliver medicines from one cabinet to another as fast as possible and without bumping into static and dynamic objects. This year, due to COVID-19, all meetings and tests are done from home. The meeting schedule is shown at the end of the wiki. The software for the autonomous robot (PICO) is written in C++ and applied to a simulation environment since there has been no interaction with PICO. The simulation environment should represent the real test as closely as possible and therefore the information on this page should be applicable to the real test.

Design document

In order to get a good overview of the assignment a design document was composed which can be found here. This document describes the requirements, the software architecture which consists of the functions, components and interfaces and at last the system specifications. This document provides a guideline to succesfully complete the Escape Room Challenge.

Escape Room Challenge

The Escape Room Challenge consists of a rectangular room with one way out. PICO will be placed on a random position on a map which is unknown to the challengers before taking the challenge. PICO should be able to detect the way out by itself using the Laser Range Finder (LRF) data and drive out of the room without hitting a wall using its three omni wheels.

To create a solid strategy a number of options have been outlined. Two solid versions were considered; wall following and a gap scan version. After confirming that the gap scan version can, if correctly implemented, be a lot faster than following the wall, this option was chosen. Wall following does not require much understanding of the perception of PICO. By constantly looking at the wall and turning if a corner is reached, PICO will move forward as soon as no wall is visible in front of it indicating that the corridor is found. One other reason to use gap detection over wall following as a strategy is that the gap detection and moving to certain targets can later on be used in the Hospital Challenge. In the Hospital Challenge multiple rooms are present, objects are placed in the rooms and cabinets have to be reached which make wall following unapplicable.

The code is divided in multiple parts, or functions, which work together to complete the task. These functions are separated code-wise in order to maintain a clear, understandable code. Next, the state machine of PICO is elaborated. Finally, the simulations will be discussed together with the result of the Escape Room Challenge.