MORSE CODE - PART 2

Playing around with MORSE 0.6, I was tempted to try out basic obstacle avoidance through ROS (Fuerte) nodes on PR2 and ATRV. An obstacle avoidance approach involves a closed loop control system, which is executed by a laser or sonar scan with a 'see the obstacle => turn left', type of algorithm. After some initial hiccups I was able to get it working.

Here are some details of my efforts,

Fig.1. PR2 simulation and its rxgraph

Fig.2. ATRV simulation

in the PR2 simulation, one can see the closed loop of the system in the rxgraph of the ROS nodes.

I am grateful to Michael (kargm at in dot tum dot de) for his help and suggestions. Michael has also made a video of the PR2 obstacle avoidance simulation, https://www.dropbox.com/s/66rpmuyhzkm2ka4/pr2_obstacle_avoidance.m4v .

The codes can be found at, https://github.com/Arkapravo/laser_obstacle_avoidance_morse

TORTUE

TORTUE is an effort to marry a motion sensor with a Roomba base. It was inspired from Turtlebot, Billibot and Oculus. For the base we used Roomba 560 and for the motion sensor we used ASUS Xtion Pro Live. The software platform is ROS Electric. The project is still in its early days and more is being planned for the future.

Fig.1. Concept development for Tortue

Fig.2. First run on 2nd March 2013, Saturday

The video shows a very basic obstacle avoidance behaviour using point cloud.

Fig.3. rxgraph for basic obstacle avoidance

The Tortue team comprises of ,

The project has a home page at github, http://arkapravo.github.io/tortue/. Tortue means Turtle in the French language, which reflects the use of ROS for the robot, ROS has a long term Turtle association and all of their release have a Turtle reference, also ROS softwares (viz. turtlesim) and robots (viz. turtlebot) have such naming. There has been suggestions that tortue has a likeness to wall-e, we do not deny it ! :-)