Well the title is really a misnomer, this page really shows <all> the stuff that I get up to with my PhD. It is rare that all of this happens on one day, although it has been known to happen!
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- Here’s the tractor in the built up area going between some of the research sheds at CSIRO. One of the experimental loops the tractor traversed was about 450 metres in length.
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- First up on the day’s agenda is usually a trip to the ITEE expresso machine where for 50 cents, you can get a beautiful cup of coffee. Essential for a perfect start to the day.
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- A little later in the day we may actually get to do some experimentation with a working robot. We actually have two so if one’s not working we can use the other one, which is fine of course until that one breaks as well…then there’s lots of swearing and kicking of walls – the robots are too valuable so we can’t kick them. This is a picture from a year or so ago when we were still using artificial landmarks, coloured cylinders made from A4 size paper.
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- Here’s me in the lab with two of the Pioneer robots and also the GuRoo humanoid robot which is part of a separate project.
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- Working in a demountable office at CSIRO
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- A more recent photo of the Pioneer robot, with a SICK laser attached with camera piggy backed on top. The 8 sonar sensors on the robot are essentially useless for anything but very very basic obstacle avoidance. In corridors they only pick up a return off shiny walls if the beam’s angle of incidence is within about 3 degrees of perpendicular to the surface.
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- The off the shelf, no maintenance required pioneer robots are remarkably prone to rebooting problems, hard drive corruption, power supply glitches, loose connections and a whole host of other problems which make it very hard to use them for any actual experimentation. As such, a lot of time is spent with various parts of the pioneer case open connected to peripheries such as keyboards, mice, computers, CD drives, CROs, laptops etc…
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- Recently we’ve implemented the RatSLAM system on an outdoor tractor at CSIRO. This meant we got to chase around the tractor as it was driven around various environments at the CSIRO complex, including both vegetation areas and bulit up areas.
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