Carlos Jaramillo's
Distributed Research Experience as Undergraduate (Summer 2009)
WEEKLY JOURNAL
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Journal
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Progress Report Week 7 Week 8 Week 9 Week 10 |
| Tips |
Week 1:
| Task | Comments |
| Introduction to Robotics | Acquired a general knowledge of robotics by reading the entire book “ The Robotics Primer ” by Maja J. Mataric. There is a workshop online that is related to the material covered in this book. They use iRobot's Create as the main platform for the exercises. |
| Player/Stage/Gazebo (Installation / Configuration) |
Installation in my laptop (running Ubuntu 9.04) was a little time
consuming due to the missing package dependencies. After successfully
having set this Robotics Platform ( Player ) and Simulation Environments ( Stage : 2D and Gazebo : 3D), the learning process of these
tools began. A good installation procedure for Ubuntu distributions can be found at Professor Parsons' website . (Note that for versions of Ubuntu after 8.04, the following workaround is needed) |
| Writing robot controllers in C/C++ to be used with Player/Stage in Simulated Worlds | Learned the basics of Player/Stage by following Prof. Parsons' AI class projects . Also, got a taste of Gazebo 's 3D simulation environment, although our focus is going to be on Stage (with 2D simulation worlds for the robots) |
| Looking into Python alternatives for doing robotics: PyroRobotics (simulation interface) and Myro (IPRE's framework for programming robots) | Decided to give them a try. It is possible to use Player/Stage configuration files and run simulations in the PyroRobotics GUI . On the other hand, Myro allows to interprete Python commands from its library that is used to control the “ Scribbler ” robot via bluetooth. |
| Playing with LEGO's Mindstorms Robots | Learning LEGO's RoboLab (GUI-based robotics programming
software) by following exercises from Brooklyn's College "
Exploring Robotics (CC 30.03) " course. This knowledge will be necessary for the Bridges Workshop in which we will be participating as mentors for high-school students enrolled into the robotics sessions. Perhaps, the open-source BrickOS and NQC (Not Quite C) projects are better suited for dealing with LEGO robots. We have only used the old RCX brick (not the newer NXT product) |