Mobile Robotics Final Project

West Virginia University Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Benjamin M.Statler College of Engineering and Mineral ResourcesWest Virginia University Final Submission Date : December 15, 2019 CPE 412/MAE 412 Mobile Robotics Teammates : Mathew Bergenstock, Adam Hensley, Austin Moore, Hayden Nichols, Hyejun Park, William Smith

The overall project will be developing a fully autonomous robot that explores an area without colliding with obstacles or other robots that will perform simultaneously. The performance was held in AER 222 with many obstacles, competing with other robots to determine the most efficient robot when it comes to avoid obstacles and explore the area in given time.

Demo day

Demo day

🏁 Result

Demo for 10 minutes each

First Demo

This collision total would be the highest out of all three tests for our robot due to the unexpected behavior at the start of the test.

Second Demo

Testing area was increased in size while also reducing the stationary objects within the region.

Final Demo

For the third and final test area, a dramatic increase in test area obstacles was added while still holding the area from test two constant. The largest obstacle in the new area was several crates that divided the large area into two smaller sections while leaving a small corner open connecting them.

💻 What I engaged with

Initially, a bug in the code prevented the Vector Field Histogram (VFH) planner from controlling the wheels. As such, the reactive layer was the only functioning avoidance measure for the preliminary demo. I engaged with fixing this problem and find the cause for this.

The robot became trapped in small regions of the competition area as the reactive algorithm was triggered When the robot would try to move through small corridors and favored turning left abruptly.

Improvements were made to the algorithm by fixing bugs in the VFH algorithm and removing the rigid logic behind the reactive layer.

🛠️ Skills

iRobot , C++/MATLAB

📄 Documents and Code

https://github.com/Jun0S2/Mobile-Robotics-Final-Project