Robbie - What is it
Robbie was one of my university projects. Its a little robot which has no clue of
its surroundings, but yet must be able to move around in its world. The first assignment
was to build a simulator for this robot before we could change the interface and connect to
the real Robbie.
Sounds easy, whats the catch?
Because Robbie doenst know where it is in its world, the simulated Robbie also shouldn't
be aware of its world. This means that when Robbie get a command to set four steps
forward,it should move itself four steps forward rather than the program setting Robbie's
position 4 steps from its current location within the world. consused? let me give you an example
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This is Robbie on the world. We could say Robbie is at the location (3,5) to move Robbie four steps forward we would simply say 'goto(3,1)' and Robbie would walk to that location. However, this could only be done if Robbie and the world both are aware of the robots position within the world. |
Now imagine that the robot wouldn't know its location, and neither does the world. So no coordinates to adjust.
How to move robby four steps forward? We don't know any coordinates. Thats the catch. |
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Ok, so we need to work on the moves.. what else?
the simulation must be able to manipulate Robbie and the world, this means that Robbie must be able to bumb into a wall, and that we should be able to move that wall around.
and to make it more fun, as in the real world, someone should be able to pick up Robbie and move it and then put it back down. but ofcourse only on a place where there's no wall.
How did we do it?
With the help of my college students we managed to make a nice working simulation
and got graded a 9 our of 10. This was because we also included time measuring and
catching up routines to the robot(if in the simulation Robbie would take too long
to make one step we would adjust the steppingspeed for the next step in order to
ensure that Robbie would be at the destination on the expected time.
Programmers
Wouter van den Boogaart
Pieter Buitenhuis
Paul van Dam
Leen van der Meer
Johan Stuivenberg
Program and Documents (dutch)
RobbieSimulator(1.0.24) | Setup(windows) Setup(linux) | ![]() |
Plan van AanPak | ||
Bedrijfs-Analyse | ||
Project Verslag | ||
Systeem Documentatie | ||
Source Docs | Html | |
Handleiding | Html |