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This summer, my project (and Devon's) was to work with minDART (Minnesota Distributed Autonomous Robotics Team) to improve the robots' ability to implement a task of search and retrieval in which the goal is to locate, collect, and return targets to a home base. Prior to my entry into the project, the homogenous robots had performed these tasks independently, using localization without communication for target search and retrieval. This tactic, while effective, was not efficient. The use of CDS cells to track light and localize served a good purpose, but took a significant amount of time. Through our work this summer, the CDS cells were replaced by CMUcams and the robots now implicitly communicate with each other through the use of beacons and cameras. This communication and new tool for localization decreases the time for localization as well as the recovery of targets. Through this project I learned a great deal, but most of what I learned was far from what I expected. I thought that I would be writing a lot of code, but I ended up dealing with hardware 99% of the time. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because, when dealing with robotics, one should expect to gain a significant amount of hardware knowledge. I learned to solder, make light circuits, deal with relays, build CMUcams, work with the Handyboard, and, amongst many other things, write code in Interactive C. I got to do a lot of debugging and testing as well. I improved my ability to navigate in Linux and discovered that sometimes trial and error is the best way to really learn something you are clueless about, silliness often leads to creative breakthroughs, and one does not have to write an abundance of code to be an important part of a robotics team. Most importantly, all of the hours we spent this summer with the hardware went to good use and it really paid off when we got to see something that we did in action and actually being admired by others in the field (especially at the AAAI conference). I got to work with some really great people and contribute to an excellent research project. Questions? E-mail me! |