Introduction

One of the school’s robots waits patiently while the hallways clear between 2nd and 3rd period. Then, when the student traffic has died down, she moves into the hallway and heads down to the math department to respond to a call for service. When she arrives at the math department’s tiny room, the doorway open, she makes a series of R2D2-like noises to announce her arrival.

The teaching assistant on duty places a packet of research journals into the robot’s tray, punches in the destination address, using the bumpers, and off the robot goes, now headed to the school library. Occasionally, along the way a student or teacher or other school staffer crosses paths with the robot, but none come close enough for her sonar (or the proximity sensors you’ve added) to stop her movement until traffic clears again.

Meanwhile back in the electronics classroom, two students are putting the finishing touches on the mounting and wiring of a video camera onto another of the school’s robots, while another two students in the computer classroom across the building are testing the wireless reception and network transmission of the streaming images from that camera to their PC. The plan for this team is to implement a recorded video-log of the robot’s travels, to help in their class’s analysis and evaluation of the gains that the students have implemented this year in their robot’s navigation technology and software.

At the same time, yet another computer student is working on the web site software that will allow any and all students and faculty in the building with access to PC’s, the ability to monitor live, at any time, the robot’s travels around the building, using that same video feed from the robot’s video camera.

Your Mission

Your mission is to increase and improve the skills and capabilities of one or more autonomous robot companions in the classroom and the school. You concentrate on the navigation, sensory and communications capabilities of the robot. In advanced projects you experiment with object recognition (vision) or soon, with vision-guided robot-arm-and-gripper manipulation. Or you may concentrate on remote video tracking and control of the robot, or applications for people with disabilities.

The navigation scenario described above has not yet been perfected. Students in 2004 are currently concentrating on assuring the robot’s ability to run straight lines and make accurate turns, the essential building blocks to autonomous navigation. Another current experimental activity is having the robot triangulate its position from beacons located high on the walls and at intervals in a hallway. The stepping stones are accurate navigation in a room, then between two rooms, then across a building. The technologies to do this exist today and are available on the SR4 Robot (wheel encoders, computing (for accuracy monitoring and correction and path tracking), and triangulation). The rigorous testing and the refinement of software and, when necessary, electronics and sensors, is what makes the SR4 an active technical laboratory for a variety of curriculums.

The Payoff

In the end, the SR4 robot navigation laboratory is challenging, it’s educational and it’s fun.

The payoff for your activities are the new or increased skills you develop in computer programming (Java, C, My*SQL, HTML and Linux), and/or wireless networking, PCs, embedded computers, electronics, math, geometry, report writing, project planning, teamwork, presentation and personal communication, etc.

Students taking Chinese, French, Spanish, Japanese or whatever languages the school is offering, may be provided extra credit for teaching (programming) the robots to speak and sing in the language they are studying. Take a look at Suggested Projects for additional ideas for student classroom, multi-class and/or school-wide projects.

You might also want to look at the Users Manual for the SR4 Professional and Navigator robots. The SR4 Robot comes in three basic models; the SR4 Base, Professional and Navigator. The Base and Professional models are used by students and teachers and application developers to work with a variety of robot activities that require only those capabilities. The Navigator model includes all the features of the Professional, with the addition of the Navigator module and beacon components, to support experimental beacon-triangulation. See the Comparison of the SR4 models, including the Professional with and without the SR4 outer body.