First successes in robotics

Two months in this school year have passed, and a lot has happened. Most of our project work up to now was just research; we evaluated the JADE framework for distributed agent systems, the rule based language JESS, and the Protégé Ontology API, which all are Java based and can therefore run on the CBC controller.

On friday, Dr. David Miller arrived at Vienna, and our teacher wanted to have a robot prototype to show. On wednesday, we met at university to build something out of lego... which proved to be difficult, because the collection of Lego parts was very limited, and we hardly managed to connect a single motor to the lego gears. So we met at my place the next day and built a robot out of Fischertechnik which is, in my opinion, clearly superior to Lego. The result was this robot:

Each of the tracks is powered by two motors, although that didn't seem to bring much of a performance gain. The thing on top, in case you didn't recognize it, is a camera, and the robot's objective was to follow a blue ball.

We actually programmed the robot twice; once with C, which is natively available on the controller, and once with Java, which was installed on our controller at the university during summer. My part was the Java program, and I tried to add a few abstractions to later reuse the code.

• As each of the tracks is powered by multiple motors, I added an abstraction for the motors, to combine multiple physical motors into one logical motor
• Next was the drive and navigation. Our robot is tracked, so its steering uses the speed difference of the tracks. I tried to keep the theoretical possibility to use another type of steering, although some adaption is probably necessary.
• Last but not least, the robot's construction may make it more convenient to wire it in a specific way. What actuators and sensors are on which pins can be configured, so that a new construction does not necessarily mean to change the program. Especially imagine how many times a motor may be accessed in the program, and what it would mean to change all the occurrences.

Now this is just foundation code, and the real logic, checking the camera and following the ball, was simply implemented in the main method in a loop. And that's the glorious result:

For those of you that don't understand the quiet, german comments: We have adjusted the camera for our lighting, and it already got pretty dark. For the video, we turned on the lights, and suddenly, the robot stopped recognizing the ball. So, the first thing you see in the video is me turning off the lights again, and then you can hear my teacher commenting on it^^