Mentors : Sachin Gajjar
Students involved : Mehul Mistry (13bec059), Rushank Patel (14bec163)
Project : Link
Abstract: Robotic research field has advanced very much in last decade. This project discuss approach to design autonomous robot. Issues like mapping, localization of robot, odometry information of robot, path planning and autonomous navigation are important issue in the field of autonomous robot. Robotic operating system is used with robot for implementing localization, odometry and indoor mapping. Autonomous robot works very well in real time environment than conventional robot.
Currently autonomous/intelligent robot is in research. It is not used much in real world. But in near future, its use is defiantly going to increase. Many big companies like google and Boston electronics are working on Driverless car. So, it will not be a big surprise if we see driverless car on road in near future.
Robotic Operating System is easy and efficient tool to implement any Robot. It have already many algorithms available. It is open source and free tool. Although there are some limitation of it. One is that, ROS was not able to run properly on Raspberry pi. So we had to use laptop instead. Even though ROS is easy and all the algorithms are available, it takes time to learn it.
For mapping of environment Microsoft Kinect or Lidar can be used. Microsoft Kinect is cheaper. But if we were to implement mapping using it, then we will require Odometry data from Encoder motor. On the other had Lidar is costly, but it will not require Odometry data from encoder motor and thus implementation will become easy.