This page is part of the NIWeek 2010 Robotics Demo series of blog posts. For an introduction to the demo and links to other parts of the series, visit http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-13031/.
Our previous post on obstacle avoidance, mapping, and steering explains how we made our robots successfully move throughout the robot arena. If you consider the fully and semi-autonomous modes in which our robots can operate, however, you might think we've put the cart before the horse. That is, we haven't answered how the robots know where to drive to. This final part of our NIWeek Demo series explains a little about how our robots generated paths to follow throughout the arena.
You can find our path planning code at (path as viewed in NIWeek 2010 Robotics Demo.lvproj😞
If you recall from our Driver Station User Interface post, when in fully autonomous mode, robots generate a destination, or goal position, to which to navigate. The Autonomous Explorer Loop VI referenced above automatically performs this task when the following criteria are met: 1) The robot's current goal position is explored and the robots are still trying to explore the arena, or 2) the robot has reached its current goal or the current goal is unreachable. In semi-autonomous mode, a user at a driver station selects a goal position on the map for his or her robot to navigate to. In both cases, after a robot has a goal position, it still must perform path planning to get from its current location to its destination.
Put simply, a robot operating autonomously calculates the shortest path through the 20 x 20 cell occupancy grid from its current position to the goal position (remember, our obstacle avoidance, mapping, and steering post discusses our demo's map and occupancy grid). To accomplish this, the Path Planning Loop VI performs the following tasks.
This post concludes our NIWeek 2010 Robotics Demo series. In following our discussions, from data communication to simulating GPS data to detecting and avoiding obstacles, we hope you've gained a few new ideas to use when tackling robotics applications of your own. While you're out there solving problems and implementing your own solutions, we'd love for you to join in here in the LabVIEW Robotics Community by sharing your own robotics-related example programs, instrument drivers and other software IP for LabVIEW Robotics.
This site uses cookies to offer you a better browsing experience. Learn more about our privacy statement and cookie policy.