Here are the guidelines I mentioned in class on Monday Feb 22:

•   Projects should focus on some topic related to manipulation or mobile robotics and are intended to be an effort over approximately 5 weeks
•   I encourage teams of 3 +/- 1
•   There will be some project update meetings on several mondays as per the syllabus
•   Written report and class presentation are due at the end of the semester
•   Tentative project proposals due Friday March 5
•   Scope and suitability of projects will be negotiated between me and project teams
•   Projects need not be ground-breaking research.

 

• Some students have been coming to me with ideas for projects that have been focused on building neat robots rather than on interesting "scientific" problems in  robotics,  so I suggest the following guideline:   There should be more science than engineering in your project.

• The focus of your project should be on some "scientific" problem, which is not to say that there can't be any engineering, but that it should play a secondary role, e.g. construction of hardware to implement or verify a solution to a "scientific" problem.  If you were pressed for time at the end of the semester, it should be the engineering that gets left out rather than the science.  The engineering should not be critical to your project. "Engineering" can apply to software as well as hardware.  By "scientific" problem, I mean a problem in which has some generality and for which you will take a principled approach in a solution.

• One of the questions that I will be asking as I evaluate the suitability and scope of projects is what you will learn from doing this project.

• I will tend to expect a little more from students who are registered for the graduate version of the class.  Let me know if there are students on one project team who are registered for different versions of the class (some for 4964 and some for 6963).

• You might also look through the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, and the International Journal on Robotics Research for ideas.

Hardware projects

• Aside from the nomad robot, i expect to have computer platforms that have A/D, D/A, and DIO capabilities, some motors, and some solenoids.  I also expect to have a camera and framegrabber.  Hobby servos are a possibility.  Other hardware is a possibility.

• The Nomad robot.  This robot has a ring of sonar sensors and bump sensors.  It is a synchro drive robot with on board x86 computer(s) running Linux (I think).  There are a number of possible projects with this robot, mostly centering around robot navigation and making maps from sonar data.

 

 

Here are a few suggestions:
 

• Make the robot map a room --- create an "arena" for the robot and place some obstacles in locations unknown to the robot.  The robot should wander around the area and create a map of where the obstacles are located
• Implement some sort of path planning for the robot --- given a map of an area (with obstacles) and some tasks, have it plan and execute a path
• Motor control: by itself, this wouldn't quite fit the bill of relating to manipulation or mobile robotics, but there are a number of  manipulation projects that can be done with a single motor such as:
• Implementing the Buhler juggler (there are some sensing issues here)
• Throwing a rolling disc in the plane by flinging it off a "bat" --- by knowing the properties of a disc, plan a bat trajectory so that the disc rolls of the bat and lands at a goal location (in the plane)
• Automatic yoyo: tie a yoyo on to the end of a force sensor on a solenoid.  can you work the yoyo only by actuating the solenoid and using only the force sensor readings?
•  Control of a nonholonomic robot with a trailer (hardware for this project is not yet certain)  more details to come
• There is some possibility that I might borrow a small puma robot which could also be available for manipulation related projects such as palmar manipulation or pushing.

Software projects

• You can write a simulator for almost any sort of robotic system and then experiment with algorithms to control that system.

• There is a robot soccer simulator available, but this may be an ambitious project...

• Implement some algorithm from a paper.  Some possibilites are:
•   A nonholonomic path planning algorithm
•   Planners for modular robots (such as those by Rus, Chirikjian, and Unsal)
•   Parts feeding systems - design a scheme for feeding parts and develop a simulator and algorithms
•   Modular fixturing algorithms
•   The Coulomb pump (using time averaged frictional forces to position parts on a surface)
• I have a simulation environment for multiple mobile robots available if you are interested in collaborative robotics

Term paper projects

• Some aspect of mobile robot navigation or localization
• Various control topics related to robotics (mostly concerning underactuated systems)
• Visual servoing
• Cooperative robotics