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.

Video of the program in action: [link]

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. (How does the function works?). The simulation video can be found here [].

Yuri

(Text/Video)

Yuhui

(Text/Video)

Practical Session

Running the code on the real robot made us 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

Local planning's job is finding what velocity and direction command to send the wheels given a "local" goal. The local goal in this context is usually some point on the global plan that will follow the global plan as it takes us from the start to the finish. Local planning will usually account for live/active sensor readings, and is the algorithm most responsible for obstacle avoidance, and the behaviours you witness as a human observer. It will try to follow the global plan if given, but if a dynamic object is kept in the environment that the global planner did not account for, there is a high probability that the robot might crash into it. It is the job of a local planner to avoid such scenarios.

For local navigation, the two solutions we considered for the restaurant scenario are the Dynamic Window Approach and the Artificial Potential Fields.

Simulation

Dynamic Window Approach

We implemented the dynamic window approach algorithm based on the paper "The Dynamic Window Approach to Collision Avoidance", by D. Fox et al.

Implementation of code and functionality

(Pavlos)- Add code implementation and working, eg functions, classes

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.

Simulation Results

Video displaying the run on the simulation environment:

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

Problems

(Pavlos)- write any specific problems with daw and proposed solution if any

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 Fields

Implementation of code and functionality

(Yuri)- Add CODE implementation and working eg functions, classes

We implemented the Artificial Potential Fields algorithm [as in literature], where the robot is influenced by two types of potential fields: an attracting potential that pulls it towards the goal and a repulsing potential that pushes it away from obstacles. The attracting potential is defined to decrease as it nears the goal, which directs the robot to move closer. The repulsing potential increases as the robot approaches obstacles, which prevents collisions. The combination of these two potentials gives the resulting force vector that determines the robot's movement direction and speed.

Simulation Results

(Yuri)

Video displaying the run on the simulation environment:

(link)

Problems

(Yuri) - write any specific problems with apf and proposed solution if any

One of the challenges we faced was tuning the parameters(?). (ANY POSSIBLE SOL from students side?)

Assignment Questions

Explain implementation details about DWA: Pavlos

1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of your solutions?

DWA (Pavlos)

APF (Yuri)

2. What are possible scenarios which can result in failures for each implementation?

DWA: (Pavlos)

APF: (Yuri)

3. How would you prevent these scenarios from happening?

DWA: (Pavlos)

APF: (Yuri)

4. For the final challenge, you will have to link local and global navigation. The global planner will provide a list of (x, y) (or (x, y, θ) ) positions to visit. How could these two algorithms be combined?

(TO WRITE)

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

Artificial Potential Field Approach

(TO BE TESTED)

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

Probabilistic Road Map (PRM)

Implementation and Code Exercises Explanation

(Addy) - Write code exercises

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 and Disadvantages

(Addy)

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.

Simulation Results

(Addy) - add prm result

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

Problems

(Addy)- add problem discussed with Pavlos

A-star Algorithm

Implementation and Code Exercises Explanation

(Wenyu)

how A-star works, and code exercises explanation

Advantages and Disadvantages

(Wenyu)

advantages: balabala disadvantages:

Simulation Results

Video recording for a-star implementation without PRM:

Small_Maze: https://youtu.be/MarLBC3igVI

Large_Maze: https://youtu.be/C9wwy7IZU4Y

Problems

(Wenyu) - write any specific problems with a* and proposed solution if any

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

Also this video: https://youtu.be/1V__BW8XyRE

Please check which video you want to keep and also remove noise/sound from the video.

Combining local and global planning

(Yuhui) - add code implementation and problems if

To use our local planner with the global planning code we had to make some modifications on the implementation. Specifically we implemented the local planner as a class. The planner's parameters are now attributes of an object and the driver code (main) can now set these parameters and call the relevant methods. Also the velocities are now sent to the robot through the main file instead of sending them inside the planner's functions. The local planner's method that is used the most in the main code is the "local_planner_step" method which finds the next transnational and rotational velocities given the current robot pose, the robot dynamics, the next (local) goal and the laser measurements.

After making the necessary changes, we were able to run the global navigation path generation together with the local navigation. However the robot's behavior wasn't the one expected. The robot would deviate from the path and/or collide with the walls in some cases. To solve the problem we fine tuned the PRM's parameters for generating a graph with smoother paths and we went over the DWA code to find the possible bugs that were causing the collisions. The main problem was in the admissibility condition for a new pair of velocities, where we needed to increase the distance threshold between the robot and an obstacle for non-admissible velocities.

Video after the described changes:

https://youtu.be/115bQwOZydw

(Sketch of maze with proposed nodes and connections in between). ??

Assignment Questions

1. How could finding the shortest path through the maze using the A* algorithm be made more efficient by placing the nodes differently? Why would this be more efficient? (Addy) - PRM*

2. Would implementing PRM in a map like the maze be efficient? (Addy)

3. What would change if the map suddenly changes (e.g. the map gets updated)? (Addy)

4. How did you connect the local and global planner? (Yuhui)

5. Test the combination of your local and global planner for a longer period of time on the real robot. What do you see that happens in terms of the calculated position of the robot? What is a way to solve this? (Pavlos and addy)

6. Run the A* algorithm using the gridmap (with the provided nodelist) and using the PRM. What do you observe? Comment on the advantage of using PRM in an open space. (Wenyu) - Add sim results too

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.

Week 4 and 5 - Localization

Questions and Answers

Assignment 0.1

How is the code is structured?

What is the difference between the ParticleFilter and ParticleFilterBase classes, and how are they related to each other?

How are the ParticleFilter and Particle class related to eachother?

Both the ParticleFilterBase and Particle classes implement a propagation method. What is the difference between the methods?

Assignment 1.1

What are the advantages/disadvantages of using the first constructor, what are the advantages/disadvantages of the second one?

In which cases would we use either of them?

in the

[screenshot]

Assignment 1.2

Interpret the resulting filter average. What does it resemble? Is the estimated robot pose correct? Why?

Imagine a case in which the filter average is inadequate for determining the robot position.

[screenshot]

Assignment 1.3

Why do we need to inject noise into the propagation when the received odometry infromation already has an unkown noise component?

What happens when we stop here, and do not incorporate a correction step?

[screen-recording]