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Posted by on May 25, 2008, 5:45 pm
circlechess wrote:
> Hello World,
>
> I am in a college robotics club and I would like to make a robot that
> can navigate locally (like in one corner of a room to another or from
> one room to another, for starters). It would be awesome if it could
> respond to voice commands or simple inputs like "office" or "commons"
> and be able to know where to go. I would like to be able to program a
> "mini map" of the environment or create some way of the robot moving
> around it's environment and "learning" where things are located
> (perhaps via sensors and memory of location points?).
>
> I am not exactly sure where to start or how realistic this is. I
> think Rodney Brooks at the MIT AI Lab has worked on similar things
> using mobile and walking robots. I suppose this might be similar, but
> I am just not sure where to start in getting this going and what the
> prerequisite knowledge to undertaking this would be.
>
> I have some programming experience in C++ and will be exploring Scheme/
> Lisp in the coming weeks so I am flexible to whatever language is
> needed to most efficiently get this going. I would like the language
> not to be too limited, however. I currently have a Laptop with Linux
> installed onto it that I was planning to use as the robot "brain" and
> hook this up to little motors and wheels, etc. on some sort of base/
> platform that I can use to program it to move. I would need to get
> sensors so that it doesn't bump into things as it is moving about.
>
> I would ideally like it to be able to have a decent map of how to get
> here and there while also using the sensors to do obstacle avoidance.
>
> Also-- are there any competitions, national or international, that
> this type of robot could be enrolled? It would be nice to have some
> type of standard/structure/format to guide me/my club as we try to
> build this robot.
>
> Cheers!
>
> -Yama
Look into the FIRST annual competitions of robotics.
Sonar is probably the cheapest way to map a room. GPS won't work inside,
and has too coarse a resolution anyway.
If you mostly want to explore high-level programming, you might consider
just buying a mobile base, otherwise you'll have to work through the
drives, electronics, and controls (which is also fun).
You'll need to decide whether the brains travel with the bot, or control
remotely. Many really good processor boards exist that can run pretty
complex programs, check the AVR AT series.
Mike
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> I am in a college robotics club and I would like to make a robot that
> can navigate locally (like in one corner of a room to another or from
> one room to another, for starters). It would be awesome if it could