Autonomous Mobile Robot Surveyor (Spring 2003) IPRO 308

Technological developments in recent years make it possible to constructsmall autonomous mobile platforms equipped with computing hardware andsensors that can communicate with each other and/or with a centralstation. The uses of such platforms are numerous and range from militaryand security applications to monitoring and inspection. While low leveltasks such as obstacle avoidance should be handled by the mobile robotin order to free the attention of a human supervisor, higher level tasksmay require user intervention based on images and other sensoryinformation which is provided by the platform. The way in which taskscan be specified based on the limited information provided by thesurveyor(s) in a natural way is an interesting problem without a simplesolution. This is mainly due to the fact that 2D images and othersensory information are only partial representations of the real 3Dworld. The goal of the project in this semester is to build one or more smallautonomous mobile robot surveyors that can communicate with a remotecontrol-station. The surveyor will use a single board computer, a smallcamera, several range sensors, servo motors, and will be controlled bywireless communication. These surveyors will be used in future projectsto investigate the human interaction and task specification problems.Sponsorship: IT Collaboratory for Interprofessinal StudiesProject Plan for IPRO 308: Autonomous Mobile Robot Surveyors for Spring 2003 semeste