Enabling basic motion behaviors on irobot create

• Main Author: Du, Xinxin.
• Other Authors: Lau Wai Shing, Michael
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering::Robots
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/46018
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Robotics has archived a great success in industrial manufacturing applications, however, for home use, there is still a lot to be improved. iRobot Create is a special robot development platform designed by iRobot Company. The objective of the project is to carry out a full investigation on this platform and implement some basic home-use-robot behaviors on it to assess its suitability to be developed further for home use. The investigation results showed that the iRobot Create had a great potential to be developed for home use purpose as it utilized multiple sensors to provide the user a full set of status information, it could be easily interfaced by external control units and it was compatible with external electronic devices as well. The basic behaviors that were implemented on this platform included wheeled locomotion, path following, wall following, docking, color tracking and end point navigation. The testing results showed that the robot was able to carry out these behaviors with the assists of other devices, and thus more complex behaviors could be implemented further. In this project, the robot was controlled by both the netbook and the command module. The netbook took care of high-level code, sent command to the command module and functioned as a supervisor, while the command module looked into lower level code, controlled the robot and processed sensor data received from the robot. The use of the control architecture, which made the best use of the advantages of each control unit, made the robot more adaptable to home use environment and more capable in carrying out complex behaviors.