A Student Project using Robotic Operating System (ROS) for Undergraduate Research

Abstract

) received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1990 in Mechanical Engineering. His Thesis and initial work was on underwater explosion bubble dynamics and ship and submarine whipping. After graduation he took a position with the US Army where he has been ever since. For the first decade with the Army he worked on notable programs to include the M829A1 and A2 that were first of a kind composite saboted munition. His travels have taken him to Los Alamos where he worked on modeling the transient dynamic attributes of Kinetic Energy munitions during initial launch. Afterwards he was selected for the exchange scientist program and spent a summer working for DASA Aerospace in Wedel, Germany 1993. His initial research also made a major contribution to the M1A1 barrel reshape initiative that began in 1995. Shortly afterwards he was selected for a 1 year appointment to the United States Military Academy West Point where he taught Mathematics. Following these accomplishments he worked on the SADARM fire and forget projectile that was finally used in the second gulf war. A Student Project using Robotic Operating System (ROS) for Undergraduate ResearchIn this student led undergraduate research paper we present a robotics project using the Robot Operating System (ROS). The purpose of this student paper is to document their learning path and steps taken for a project using three related, yet independent student projects so that others might benefit from the details. The students worked together initially to learn enough about ROS and it's development environment so that they might employ it. Thus far the use of ROS has primarily been focused on graduate studies where improvements to the underlying algorithms and techniques have been made. In this undergraduate approach no such attempts are made in improving the foundation algorithms already developed by top researchers and schools. Rather, the students employed published techniques to provide the foundation of their work. Specifically, the project used the Turtle-bot architecture and modules within ROS to create the components of a cooperative robotic mission. The crux of the mission is for one of the robots to autonomously explore and map an area of the engineering building while leaving bread-crumbs behind for another robot to follow. A third robot comes behind the second and uses the information from the first two to locate tags distributed throughout the building. Each student made a portion of this project, that could stand alone, so that others could use these individual modules and details for their own projects without redoing what had been done here. The three parts were broken into mapping, tag recognition with robot leader follower operations, and object location and RF tag reading. It enabled students to use the existing sensors on the turtlebot, while incorporating new devices to complete their particular missions. In this paper the students detail the learning path that was required to bring their individual technologies for their sub project to fruition. ...

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