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Applied Robotics Club : GMUGrandChallenge - Getting Involved browse

We meet in the Autonomous Robotics Lab on the 4th floor in Research I on Thursday at 7:30 PM. We do meet during the summer, so show up this Thursday!

Here is how to get involved

The purpose of this section is to provide a brief overview of how one can get involved with the GMU Grand Challenge. All members are welcome to use the robots for beginner or advanced projects. We have written some reusable code that should make it easy for you to get started writing simple programs. These robots were funded by faculty grant money and are very popular research platforms that many big companies and institutions are now using. Gaining hands-on experience with this equipment could prove to be very beneficial

Platform

  • Outdoor Robot: ActivMedia Pioneer P3-AT
    • This is an all-terrain robot base on which we mount a laptop and other sensors.
  • Indoor Robot: ActivMedia Pioneer P3-DX
    • This contains the same internal components as the P3-AT except the P3-DX has a differential drive system as opposed to the P3-AT's skid-steer system.
  • Both Pioneers contain 16 sonar range sensors, and odometers that are used to compute the robots pose (x,y,theta). We use a small laptop mounted to the robot's cover to control the robot over RS-232 (serial).

Software

  • Player/Stage - Linux C/C++ (We are currently using)
    • The software uses sockets to act as a client/server system. Player is the server that runs on the laptop, and our custom programs are the clients that must go through Player to interface with the robot and other devices. This makes it possible to run client programs on a separate laptop to control the robot remotely.
    • You will need a little bit of knowledge about installing software in Linux, sometimes from source code. To install code from source, here's the 3 main things you should need to know...
      • ./configure
      • make
      • sudo make install
    • I recommend a Debian based Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Kubuntu (Ubuntu w/ KDE). This makes it easy to install/remove software.
    • If you don't wish to install Linux, you may try a special bootable Linux LiveCD from PyroRobotics.org. This will allow you to run Player/Stage without installing any software.
    • Download and install Player, Stage, and other dependencies (See Links section)
  • ARIA - Windows C/C++ (We have the software, but not the experience using it)
    • This requires a copy of MS Visual Studio to view, edit, and run the example programs.
    • All GMU students can download or purchase (about $10) a copy of Visual Studio in case you'd like to try out ARIA. Here is the link
  • Java library
    • This is a library of lower level routines that was written by Dr. Luke.

How to get started with Player (from Player/Stage)

  • Download and install the software (we're using Player version 2.0.4)
    • In a terminal window, cd to the directory containing the source *.tar.gz file
    • Extract the directory >tar -zxvf <filename>.tar.gz
    • cd to the new directory > cd <player directory>
    • Run configure >./configure
    • If no errors
      • Run make >make
      • Run make install >sudo make install
    • else
      • haha
      • j/k, you have to resolve the dependencies and install the software that is reported missing, and perhaps a few other things.
  • Using a laptop with serial port (or USB to serial), connect to the robot's external serial connector and run some sample programs
  • First you must start the Player server program from the Linux command line
   >player <config_file>
  • Next you open a new console window and run a sample program
    • playerv
    • playerjoy
  • The playerv GUI utility allows you to move and rotate the robot and visualize the sonar sensor data.
  • The playerjoy utility allows you to move and rotate the robot using either a joystick or the keyboard.
  • In addition to these built-in utilities, you may also run a custom program
  • Check the private section of this site for instructions to download some of our programs from the CVS server.