Embedded Motion Control 2013 Group 5

Group members

Name:	Student ID:
Arjen Hamers	0792836
Erwin Hoogers	0714950
Ties Janssen	0607344
Tim Verdonschot	0715838
Rob Zwitserlood	0654389

Tutor:
Sjoerd van den Dries

Planning

DATE	TIME	PLACE	WHAT
September, 16th	15:30	GEM-N 1.15	Meeting
September, 23th	10:00	[unknown]	Test on Pico
September, 25th	10:45	GEM-Z 3A08	Corridor competition
October, 23th	10:45	GEM-Z 3A08	Final competition

To do list

DATE	WHO	WHAT
asap	Tim, Erwin	Exit detection
asap	Rob, Ties, Arjen	Move through the corridor

Logbook

Figure 1: Laser data

Figure 2: Line detection

Week 1

• Installed the following software:
  • Ubuntu
  • ROS
  • SVN
  • Eclipse
  • Gazebo

Week 2

• Did tutorials for ROS and the Jazz simulator.
• Get familiar to 'safe_drive.cpp' and use this as base for our program.

Week 3

• Played with the Pico in the Jazz simulator by adding code to safe_drive.cpp.
• Translated the laser data to a 2d plot (see Figure 1).
• Used the Hough transform to detect lines in the laser data. For the best result, the following steps are used:
  • Made an image of the laser data points.
  • Converted the RGB-image to grayscale.
  • Used a binary morphological operator to connect data points which are close to each other. This makes it easier to detect lines.
  • Detected lines using the Hough transform.
• To implement this algorithm in C++ code OpenCV will be used.
• The algorithm is implemented in the safe_drive.cpp.
• The line detection method mentioned above works fine (see figure 3,the green lines are the detected lines).

Some interesting reading

• A. Alempijevic. High-speed feature extraction in sensor coordinates for laser rangefinders. In Proceedings of the 2004 Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004.
• J. Diaz, A. Stoytchev, and R. Arkin. Exploring unknown structured environments. In Proc. of the Fourteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-2001), Florida, 2001.
• B. Giesler, R. Graf, R. Dillmann and C. F. R. Weiman (1998). Fast mapping using the log-Hough transformation. Intelligent Robots and Systems, 1998.
• Laser Based Corridor Detection for Reactive Navigation, Johan Larsson, Mathias Broxvall, Alessandro Saffiotti http://aass.oru.se/~mbl/publications/ir08.pdf