Navigating with the Tekkotsu Pilot

Tekkotsu is a free, open source software framework for high-level robot programming. We describe enhancements to Tekkotsu's navigation component, the Pilot, to incorpo-rate a particle filter for localization and an RRT-based path planner for obstacle avoidance. This allows us to largely au-tomate the robot's navigation behavior using a combination of odometry and landmark-based localization. Beginning robot programmers need only indicate a destination in Tek-kotsu's world map and the Pilot will take the robot there. The software has been tested both in simulation and on Calliope, a new educational robot developed in the Tek-kotsu lab in collaboration with RoPro Design, Inc.