Robocup@Work Software and Scientific Team Projects
Lecturers
- Christoph Steup
- Sanaz Mostaghim
Time and location
- Time: The first meeting will take place on April 6th 2016 at 15:00 (Note: If you are interested to take this project, you must attend this meeting in which we assign you in groups)
- Location: G29-035 (SwarmLab)
Usefull skills
- Programming Languages: C++, Python
- Robot Operating System: Tutorial
- Real-Time Systems
- Distributed Systems
- Image Processing
- State-Machines
Organization
The course will be taken in groups of 3-4 Students per Topic. The students and the groups will be chosen by us depending on your background. The individual topics are not fully fixed, extensions and modifications are possible depending on the skills and interest of participating students. This will be discussed in the first meeting. The result of each project is a working demonstration with commented source code and a written documentation indicating the general concept and a Howto to start the demo.
All topics will be done in cooperation with the RobOTTO Team and will relate to the RoboCup @Work-Leauge.
Available Topics
Evaluation of the Alternative Navigation Algorithm Nav2D
The RobOTTO team currently uses the ROS Nav-Stack with a modified local planner to plan an execute the movement of the robot. We now want to evaluate alternative planners to navigate the robot through the arena. The aim of this project is to integrate the Nav2D planner in an existing demo navigation setup and evaluate its performance against the tasks of the @Work-League. The focus shall be on a running prototype and a parameter evaluation of the planning algorithm.
Simulator for the @Work League
The current testing of development on the Kuka YouBot of the RoboCup-team is done completely on the robot itself, which has shown to be a serious bottle neck in the development process. Therefore, a simulator using the existing simulation framework VREP shall be constructed and integrated with the existing code base of the RobOTTO Team. TO this end a virtual counterpart of the used robot needs to be created and equipped with an interface mimicing the interface of the real youbot. The work shall focus on the basic platform and the roobotic arm. There are already models and some simulation components, which may be integrated. The choice of components and the design of the simulators extensions are up to the students.
Visual State Machine Programming for the @Work Tasks
This tasks aims to provide an alternative specification mechanism for the behaviour of the robot in the different @Work tasks. The team shall create a graphical interface to create and modify state machines using boxes and arrows. Afterwards these graphs shall either be transformed to executabe code or be interpreted on run-time. One aproach is the graph editor yED, which is an Open-Source Java program, which can be used to create arbitrary graphs. The graphs may be transformed afterwards to basic GraphML, which can be handled e.g. by the Boost C++ library. We will provide an evaluation framework, which provides callable functions to start robotic actions as well as sensory data and some example satte-machines. The goal of this task is the creation of the necessary tool-chain together with an evaluation, how long it takes to implement a state-machine using either low-level programming or the graphical interface.
More topics are yet to come. Special topics are available on demand. If students have own ideas we will gladly try to provide appropriate topics.
Slides