comp790 - Assignment 1

Overview

The primary goal of this assignment was to make the iRobot Create wander around a room and find its docking station. I implemented my method in python using the bluetooth BAM hardware.

Details

To find the dock, the robot wanders around the room. It attempts to follows the walls, since we are assuming the dock is next to some wall. Once it begins to detect the dock's infrared signals, the robot focuses on using the signals to approach the dock.

The results are not very good. I could not find a way to identify when the robot had docked with the station. The robot can find the dock and approach it using the infrared guides, however, after it (tries) to crawl up on the ramp, it does not reliably detect that it is home. This is likely related to my logic code. The clear answer to successfully navigating the robot's environment is a robust finite state machine. However, due to my unfamilarity with the interface and language, my logic was much simpler and clearly not up to the task.

The code and data for the project is available here. A pretty print html version is here.