Hi there, I am a Bachelor's student for CS and I have to do a so-called project next year. I went to our Prof of Autonomous Robotics with a friend to ask for a cool thing to work on as a team of two. His idea was to use one of the Uni's robot (omnidirectional) and let it be controlled by an Android phone.
In detail, the robot should have a general idea of the room (eg. a map). Via phone one sets a target location on the map. The robot then should find out its own location via Laser or other means and pass it to the phone, which then calculates a shortest path (A* or whatever) to the target and sends it back to the robot, which then moves along the path (and maybe also evades moving obstacles).
Now this sounds awesome, but actually I have no idea if this is possible or even doable for two beginners in a semester (while still having ~4 other lectures). Also it seems our professor himself doesn't know for sure if and how one should go about this.
So my question is, what do you think about the doability and amount? Where should I start reading? My faculty uses ROS, so I should probably start with basic tutorials?
Yes, the tutorials. Continue with the navigation stack and have a look at http://ros.org/wiki/navfn.
About doability. It is definitely doable. The rest depends on your skills and knowledge. That is something you need to know yourself.
answered 2012-03-05 06:26:37 -0500
Stefan Kohlbrecher 
As @dornhege said, what you propose is doable in principle. It would be easier if you perform path planning on the robot though, because the navigation stack already covers the functionality you require. Based on roscpp, it currently does not run on Android phones however (rosjava is the ros implementation of choice on Android phones).
Thanks for the answer. However, the whole point our Professor wants us to make is that the calculation can be made on an Android phone. Also my project partner is mainly interested in communication, so some kind of complex communication between robot and phone should be going on.
cpury ( 2012-03-05 06:40:14 -0500 )editAsked: 2012-03-05 05:24:52 -0500
Seen: 167 times
Last updated: Mar 05 '12
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