While waiting to hear back from the
IEEE Transaction on Robotics reviewers regarding the status of my submitted journal article on the Service Based Architecture for Cartography (SBAC) I started to think about all the demonstration videos that I had made over the years to document the various phases of the project. I decided to dig them all up and post them on YouTube. Surprisingly, until now, these videos were not in a single easy to find place.
For those of you that don't know, a cartographer, in short, is a software component used to manage map information. In my case it also had the ability to use the map information to plan safe routes for the robots to traverse. This was the work that ultimately drew me into the robotics field.
Continue reading to see five years of my life's work documented in about 15 minutes worth of low quality video...
This first video documents my first hands on experience with a robot. It was made for the final project in my undergraduate AI Robotics course. My group was given the task of taking broken code for the Trulla path planning algorithm and getting it to work on a Nomadic Nomad 200 robot. A path planner does pretty much what it sounds like it would do, it plans paths based on map information provided.
The demonstration was simple. The robot was given a goal location, and map that indicated certain cells in the room contained obstacles (orange cones), and this map was used by the Trulla algorithm to plan a route free of obstacles for the robot. At certain points in the video the robot stops for a while, this is because the base of the robot is actually turning so that it can change its direction of travel.
This next video was my first exposure to programming outdoor robots. At this stage my software was in its awkward teenage phase. It was quickly hacked to play well with DFRA, a robot architecture that my lab mate Matthew Long had designed for his masters thesis, which ran on all of our outdoor robots. In this video the robot is doing something very similar to what was shown in the video above. It's traversing from a start location to a goal location, and avoiding "stuff" along the way. You'll also see some uncropped screenshots of the cartographer graphical interface that I created for setting goal locations, viewing aerial maps, and viewing planned paths. The GUI was my major contribution for this phase in the project.
I should note, I did not compile this video. At the time we had a person in the lab dedicated to doing the multimedia stuff.
So this next video doesn't show anything new that will be apparent to the viewer, but the shortcomings present in the last video were corrected for this demo. This is because in the previous videos the robots only had a path planner, this is the first documented use of the robots using a "non-hacked together", full fledged cartographer component.
This video was fun to make. I learned Flash for doing the animations, and I borrowed some music from The Life Aquatic soundtrack. As with most things that I do, there was an intended level of cheesyness involved.
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