Mobile Robotics 1997
Jessica D. Bayliss, Chris Brown, Rodrigo L. Carceroni, C. Eveland, C. Harman, Abhinav Singhal, Michael J. Van Wie · 1997
After abandoning an attempt to build our own gasoline-powered automated outdoor vehicle in 1995, we purchased two M68332-controlled wheelchairs for indoor and outdoor mobile robotics research. Much of the first year has been spent on various infrastructure projects, several of which are described here. At this writing we are beginning to be in a position to do nontrivial applications and research using these platforms. This compendium of facts and experiences is meant to be useful in getting to know the organization and capabilities of our mobile robots. We first cover the basic hardware and the serial protocol used to communicate between the main computing engine and the microcontroller responsible for sensor management, motor control, and low-level sensori-motor control loops. We describe the interface to the video digitizer, a low-level obstacle avoidance routine, and a general software organization for a control architecture based on video streams. Dynamic nonholonomic models and a virtual environment for debugging and experimenting with them are described next, followed up by a visual servoing application that uses ``engineered vision'' and special assumptions.