Faculty Mentor: Damian Lyons (Fordham)

Description

Autonomous vehicles and robots are increasingly visible in magazines and news stories. It seems inevitable that they will soon be a major commercial technology. The objective of this project is to use the open-source ROS mapping and navigation stack and devise a way for a mobile robot to quickly and automatically learn the physical map for a house so that it is prepared to carry out domestic activities.

Participant Background

This project is appropriate for participants who have a background in computer science, especially Linux and Python programming. ROS is an open-source framework for building robot programs that runs under Linux, and Python is one of the easier languages in which to program ROS nodes. Experience cloning and ‘make’ing software from github would be a big help.

Objectives and Learning Goals

The participants in this project will achieve the following:

• Gain a basic understanding robot programming.
• Learn about ROS – one of the principal tools for programming robots.
• Exposure to widely used techniques and algorithms for mapping and for robot navigation.
• Experience writing ROS nodes and evaluating robot behavior.