Robot with sonar turrent - mapping on laptop via Bluetooth

[personoid]

Hi

I've been working on an autonomous mobile robot that trundles about the floor, using the standard ultrasonic sonar to navigate. The sonar is on a motor turret , so it scans across an arc in front of the robot. There are also bump switches in front, in case the sonar misses anything.

The robot communicates with base computer (my laptop!) via bluetooth , sending back it's position, orientation, and sonar soundings. These are used to produce a map, which is updated live when an event (eg a sonar sounding) occurs.

The robot uses SimpleNavigator to navigate.

It's much clearer if you look at the pictures below.:

Here's a picture of the robot:


Here's a picture of the mapping program in action.
Circles are the robot's position
Dark blue lines in the circle show the orientation
Dotted lines show the path of the robot.
Magenta dots are sonar readings.


The above map shows it trundling about the edge of my kitchen.
Reasonably accurately, as it's on lino which doesn't seems to slip much, and it hasn't been going long enough for positional error to accumulate. Of course , the further it travels, the less accurate it gets.



I can share the source code, if anyone's interested. But I warn you, I haven't put it in an easily distributable format yet!

Thanks
Personoid

PS
I need to think of a name for the robot!

[jjy]

Hi

Let me introduce my self.
I'm Billy.
I'm student.

First, I'm happy to saw your works!
And your coding ability is very awesome!
Do you use any navigator?


Because we have a graduate project kind of your works(using ultrasonic sensor..).
can you help our works?
we're wonder your code.
you don't worry about any problem.
we just explain the source code and showing robot&navigate to our professor...
May i get your source code?

please, help us...

[Vinoth]

Hi,
I am Vino doing masters. Currently i am doing my dissertation in autonomous mobile robot for hospital environment as a simulation. I have designed the robot using lego nxt and now i have to program. For that i have to get the map of the environment in which robot wants to navigate. But I didn't get an idea of getting map of the environment. Could you tell me how to generate the map using ultrasonic sensor to my pc. Is there any special software i want to use. It would be more helpful for my project if you respond to my message.
Thanks in advance,
With regards,
Vino

[personoid]

Hi all
Sorry about the delay in replying
I will look at posting or hosting the code soon.
I would like to see what use (if any!) people make of it.

To answer some questions.
On the NXT , it runs the BT send / recieve, and control code in separate threads.
It navigates using a SimpleNavigator class, i.e using the tachos in the motors that drive the wheels.
It currently makes no attempt to make sense of this position and sonar information, other than to stop and turn to one side when it encounters an obstacle.

On the PC, I use the Jigloo gui builder to help make the gui. See
http://www.cloudgarden.com/jigloo/index.html
It also runs a separate thread for the BT send / recieve.
It displays the data, and descibed and shown earlier.

Thanks
persoinoid

[burti]

On the PC, I use the Jigloo gui builder to help make the gui. See
http://www.cloudgarden.com/jigloo/index.html.

I can only recommend netbeans for gui applications.
I tryied out and used jigloo and other gui editors for eclipse several times and it crashed so often, however. That's my experience though!
Netbeans has a very good and stable gui editor (with the name matisse).
I prefer to use eclipse for nxt apps and netbeans for gui apps on my pc.