First up on the day's agenda is usually a trip to the ITEE
expresso machine where for 50 cents, you can get a beautiful cup of
coffee. Essential for a perfect start to the day.
The off the shelf, no maintenance required pioneer robots are
remarkably prone to rebooting problems, hard drive corruption, power
supply glitches, loose connections and a whole host of other problems
which make it very hard to use them for any actual
experimentation. As such, a lot of time is spent with various
parts of the pioneer case open connected to peripheries such as
keyboards, mice, computers, CD drives, CROs, laptops etc...
A little later in the day
we may actually get to do some experimentation with a working
robot. We actually have two so if one's not working we can use
the other one, which is fine of course until that one breaks as
well...then there's lots of swearing and kicking of walls - the robots
are too valuable so we can't kick them. This is a picture from a
year or so ago when we were still using artificial landmarks, coloured
cylinders made from A4 size paper.
A more recent photo of the Pioneer robot, with a SICK laser
attached with camera piggy backed on top. The 8 sonar sensors on
the robot are essentially useless for anything but very very basic
obstacle avoidance. In corridors they only pick up a return off
shiny walls if the beam's angle of incidence is within about 3 degrees
of perpendicular to the surface.
Recently we've implemented the RatSLAM system on an outdoor
tractor at CSIRO. This meant we got to chase around the tractor
as it was driven around various environments at the CSIRO complex,
including both vegetation areas and bulit up areas.
Here's the tractor in the built up area going between some of
the research sheds at CSIRO. One of the experimental loops the
tractor traversed was about 450 metres in length.
Here's me in the lab with two of the Pioneer robots and also
the GuRoo humanoid robot which is part of a separate project.