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Mobile Robotics Laboratory
UR > CS > Research > Vision > Labs > Mobile Robotics Laboratory

Description:

The Mobile Robot Lab is currently the "Piano Room." This is the room with no number on the 6th floor to the right of 602 and across from 601. Access is by key card. There is lots of equipment, more or less "detailed" (well, outlined) at the above link. One of my hopes is that the main occupants of the room, our two Pioneer robots, can become (literally) vehicles for graduate research. One issue is that at present much of the work on the robot uses Microsoft software. How problematic this is I do not know now. As usual, the mobile robot project is, 96% of the time, in between integrations of various software components such as NLU, navigation, vision, and so forth. However, basic robot control software has come a long way since the "Tinman" interactive C environment we had for the wheelchair robots. The robot researchers have been avid, relentless, and ruthless in their search for and comparison of environments. They have settled on Aria, which is provided by ActivMedia, the makers of Pioneer. To other systems, viz. Ayllu and Saphira, were thoroughly investigated. Aria provides hardware and software demos in a package that can be downloaded and run. This is thus (it says here) a maintained, commercial, free-standing, turn-key set of routines to show off very basic platform capabilities. These demos have, I imagine, little to do with the actual sophistication of the extra sensors bolted onto Mabel (IR, video, acoustic) and the intricacies of hooking them up and using them are definitely beyond my comprehension at this writing. However, they provide a painless initial hands-on experience for anyone wanting to get his feet wet in the robot lab.

Location:

CSB

Equipments:

Mobile Robots: