Mobile Robot Control 2024 R2-D2

Introduction

This the wiki of the R2-D2 team for the course Mobile Robot Control of the Q4 in the year 2023-2024. The team is consisted from the following members.

Group members:

Caption

Name	student ID
Yuri Copal	1022432
Yuhui Li	1985337
Wenyu Song	1834665
Aditya Ade	1945580
Isabelle Cecilia	2011484
Pavlos Theodosiadis	2023857

Week 1 - The art of not crashing

Simulation

Pavlos

My idea was to use the LiDAR sensor to detect any objects directly on the front of the robot. Thus when the robot would move forward it would detect the distance from the object directly in the front of it and stop before reaching a predefined threshold. In the video the threshold was 0.5 meters. To detect the distance from the object exactly on the front I used the measurement in the middle of the ranges list in a laser scan message. I also created a function which takes as an argument a laser scan message and an angle in degrees and returns the distance measurement of the ray at that angle.

Video displaying the run on the simulation environment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXB-z1hzYxE

Isabelle

I took the laser reading at the middle angle by taking the middle value of the reading range, together with the two readings before and after it. The robot moves forward by default and if these values go under 0.3m, it will stop.

Wenyu

Video record of dont_crash implementation & measurements: https://youtu.be/brgnXSbE_CE

Aditya

For this assignment I decided to improve upon the existing code of my group member Pavlos. Because I had the similar idea on the implementation of dont_crash as him, I decided to make the robot do more than what was asked for using the existing implementation. I developed a function turnRobot and made a loop in main code that makes the robot turn 90 degrees in the left direction as soon as it detects an obstacle infront of it and continue to move forward until it detects another obstacle and the process is repeated again. The simulation video can be found here [].

Practical Session

Running the code on the real robot made me realize that the use of a single ray doesn't make much sense with real life obstacles. Instead it would be better to use a range of rays based on the angle of detection we would like to have (e.g. angles from -5 to +5 degrees from the direction of the robot).

Video from the practical session:

https://youtube.com/shorts/uKRVOUrx3sM?feature=share

Week 2 - Local Navigation

Problem Statement

Simulation

Dynamic Window Approach

We implemented the dynamic window approach algorithm based on the paper "The Dynamic Window Approach to Collision Avoidance". The tuning of the scoring function seemed to be not trivial since different values result in different behaviors. For example a lower factor for the values of the heading error together with a higher factor for the values of the clearance score result in more exploration of the space where the robot prefers to move towards the empty space instead of moving to the goal.

Video displaying the run on the simulation environment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6rQc6_jtUE

Question for TAs: Can we plot somehow the trajectories in the RVIZ environment?

Answer: We can send a single path like it is demonstrated in the global navigation assignment but it's not clear if we can send multiple paths.

Artificial Potential Approach

Yuri

Practical Session

Dynamic Window Approach

When we run our code on the actual robot we noticed a similar to the simulation behavior. The robot would get stuck in local minima points for high values of the heading coefficient and for smaller values it would prefer to avoid the obstacles instead of heading towards the goal. Again we had the oscillating behavior when no obstacles were near the robot and the robot was heading towards the goal. We believe that this behavior is due to the discretization of the possible heading directions. More specifically when the scoring function is only affected by the heading (e.g. no obstacles near the robot) the robot wants to have the perfect heading (zero heading error) towards the goal. However this isn't possible because we have discrete headings where none of them would be perfect for any given time. As a result, the robot picks once a non perfect heading which will cause a small divergence (heading error) and then it will pick a heading to fix this divergence which will have the same effect but now on the other side. That creates what we see as an oscillating path towards the goal.

What we could do to fix this:

• Decrease the maximum rotational speed. That would make the sampling finer but would reduce the exploration for a single cycle of the algorithm. In theory we could also increase the sampling points but when we tried that, the robot couldn't keep up with the 4Hz frequency due to computational workload. Although, even with more samples we would still end up to this oscillating behavior (still perfect heading wouldn't be possible) but maybe with a smaller magnitude.
• Allow some small heading error. One way to do this would be to set the heading error used in the scoring function to zero for real heading errors smaller than a value (e.g. 5 degrees).

Other things to consider:

• Make the distance/clearance calculation function more efficient.

Video of the practical session test:

https://youtu.be/6xJ0gVoatIQ

Week 3 - Global Navigation

Problem Statement

As we know that the goal of the robot is to navigate through a map from a starting point to an end point on the map. But how will a robot navigate efficiently in the environment and dodging any know obstacles? This is where global navigation takes charge. It basically provides a systematic path to the robot which it can follow to reach the destination. There are multiple ways to implement global navigation but the team decided to use PRM and A* algorithms.

Simulation

PRM (Probabilistic Road Map)

Probabilistic Road Mapping is a technique used to create a path using nodes/vertices and edges/connections. To understand the implementation in detail, you can look at the code at our gitlab page. In brief, we start by randomly sampling the nodes in a map and connect every node in the proximity using an edge if they are valid. There are various advantages in using PRM algorithm as compared to grid based approach due to its flexibility and scalability. In the code, we used Bresenham's line algorithm that creates edges optimally that avoids all the existing know obstacles in the map. PRM uses navigation techniques like Dijkstra or A* algorithms to find the most efficient path in the graph generated by it.

Advantages:

Although, PRM is a very effective graph generation algorithm, it has certain drawbacks. For example, the algorithm effectiveness is highly dependent on hyperparameters that we provide like number of nodes, the minimum distance between the two nodes that it needs to connect, etc.

Results: The PRM results for the given map_compare are given here [].

A-star Algorithm

Theory

how A-star works

Advantages & Disadvantages

advantages: balabala

Code structure

some code part

Result

Video recording for a-star implementation without PRM:

Small_Maze: https://youtu.be/MarLBC3igVI

Large_Maze: https://youtu.be/C9wwy7IZU4Y

After combining A-star and PRM, global navigation result in Compare_Map is shown: https://youtu.be/jQf0NvlVsYE

Combining local and global planning

We notice some issues when executing the generated path with the local planner. There is some deviation from the path and also oscillations.

Video: https://youtu.be/1V__BW8XyRE

Practical Session

After working with the real robot, we noticed some problems with the DWA local planner. More specifically the robot would crash if obstacles were too close to it and the robot wouldn't move if the frequency of the planner was high. By noticing this behavior we found and resolved some bugs related to DWA. The issue we need to solve now is the case of a dynamic obstacle that ends up exactly on a node position making a local goal not reachable.