ARLISS Along with GaTech Rescue Robot Team
Faculty Advisor:
Dr. Mahesh V. Panchagnula, IIT Madras
Overview
The objective of this competition is to build a robust mobile robot (within specified dimension constraints) which can autonomously navigate to a predetermined target after being launched to approximately 10,000 ft(3050m). An international team lead by students of Dr. William Singhose, Georgia Institute of Technology, comprising of team members from India (IIT Madras), South Korea, Hungary and Greece took part in this competition, which is held annualy on the Black Rock Playa in Nevada in the second week of September.
My major contribution in this project includes:
- An Arduino Library to interface with GPS+Compass module (Locosys LS20126) and parse the NMEA strings to extract position and heading information. The library is available in Github.
- Developed control algorithms for the Zoo Lantern and Solar Rover to navigate to the target based on GPS and Compass data.
ABU Robocon 2013
Guide:
Dr. Prabhu Rajagopal, IIT Madras
Overview
Asian Broadcasting Unit Robocon is an International Robotics competition with a unique problem statement every year which requires multiple robots to complete the tasks in a given sequence. The key challenges which our robots solved consistently include:
- Shooting a bud-like-object (custom designed) which lands erect on a raised platform from over 4 meters away.
- Autonomously navigating while executing a series of precise manipulation tasks.
- Precisely placing objects at an extension of upto 1.5m
IIT Madras: Achieving Green planet at Robocon 2013 and winning the "The Fastest Job Completing Robot" title.
Lunar Rover Challenge
Overview
The objective is to build an all-terrain mobile robot which can be controlled remotely from a laptop through realtime video transmission. The rover should navigate a rugged terrain and go through multiple checkpoints while taking photos and videos which are to be submitted to a central computer on the LAN. The well-known Rocker-Bogie mechanism was used for terrain navigalibity and it was modified to fit within the given dimension constraints.
Modules
- Beaglebone Black was used to control the Rover and a TP-Link Mini Wireless N USB Adapter was used to connect the rover to a LAN.
- A Logitech C310 webcam was used at Low-Res for Realtime Video transmission over LAN using a gstreamer pipeline.
- A Logitech HD Pro C920 webcam was used to capture 1080p photos and videos and a FFmpeg pipeline was used to overlay Timestamps, Positions Info, Team Logos etc...
- The rover was remotely controlled from Laptop by sending commands using Python's Socket module.
- A Control center application was made using PyQt to display the video feed and relay the commands to the rover.
| The Design presentation can be found here. |
| Simulation in Lunar Environment using Gazebo. Video can be found here. |