lab 11

Attendances: Carsten, Dan
Duration: 11:30 - 14:30

Goal

The goal this week is to look into projects.

Plan

We discuss different possible projects. We analyse the difficulty and
main problems of each project.

• 
  Road navigation
• 
  Synthetic creatures
• 
  Sex bots
  

Road navigation

The road navigation problem is have a robot identify and map a Lego
road network and be able to go from point to point in it.

Software and hardware

• 
  Robot able to:
  • 
    Drive around
  • 
    Sensors to navigate the roads.
  • 
    Know where it is (Tacho meter)
• 
  Software capable of;
  • 
    Storing road network (make graph)
  • 
    identifying road sections
  • 
    Resistance to poor location (tacho meter errors)
  • 
    Handling a lot of sensor input to build a consistent view of the world

Main difficulty

• 
  Initially building the network mainly
  • 
    Robot need to drive for a long with a lot of turns (which increase tacho error)
  • 
    Making sure entire network is covered.
  • 
    Connecting information from different sensors.

What to present at end of project.

• 
  Robot to build a map of a road network
• 
  Move from point to point in the constructed network
• 
  How sensors can operate together to increase precision
• 
  How many small behaviors can work together.
  

Synthetic creatures

Make a robot that emulates a creature, with desires and behaviors of
said creature.

Software and hardware

• 
  A potentially weird robot (as it need to match some creature)
• 
  Special form of locomotion
• 
  Simplifying creature behavior to something a robot can do.
• 
  Emulate complex creature behaviors with a small amount of code.

Main difficulty

• 
  Simulate complicated creatures with simple Lego blocks.
• 
  Realistic simulation of behavior and needs

What to present at end of project.

• 
  Behavior and need simplifications
• 
  Robot that looks and behaves like a creature.
• 
  How simple sensors were used to emulate complex sensors (smell/touch/…)
  

Sex bots

Robots that can share code and information with each other (over IR/Bluetooth).

Different robots with same set of behaviors. Robots have different
priorities on their behaviors. Pairing robots can combine their
priorities to form a new robot.

Behaviors can simulate a artificial environment defining the needs of
the robot (water, food, hunt, …).

Software and hardware

• 
  Simple robot. Maybe something to determine if one robot (set of
  priorities) yields better results than a different one.
• 
  Bluetooth
• 
  Getting information about robot developments.
• 
  > 1 robots. possible with 1 if we can determine a score for a set
  of priorities.

Main difficulty

• 
  Defining interesting behaviors.
• 
  Communication between robots
• 
  Comparing properties of different sets of priorities
• 
  Getting Bluetooth to work.
• 
  Combining robots.
• 
  feedback:
  • 
    Knowing exactly what behavior each robot is doing at any given
    time.
  • 
    Getting Bluetooth to work

What to present at end of project.

• 
  Unexpected good/bad behavior we wouldn't have come up with ourselves.
• 
  Evolutionary solutions to problems. (define problem. randomize/breed
  robots to find best solution)
  

Progress

We got bluetooth to work.

pc programs using bluetooth need pccomm.jar and bluecove.jar.