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[ Development of Mobile Robot Platform for Evaluation of Brain-Inspired Chips ]
Sub-project leader : Ishii
Development of Experimental Robotic Field for Evaluation of Brain-Inspired Technology, and Mobile Robot Platform with Omni-directional Movement
(1) Abstract
In parallel with the advancement of processors, robotic applications have been broadened from industry to service area, e.g., guidance, patrol, tele-operation, surgery, rehabilitation, entertainment, Robocup, etc. In order to realize these new generation robots, a lot of technical issues (sensory system, actuator, recognition, learning, behavior planning, control, etc) remain and should be solved. For the evaluation of new technology, experiments in real environment play important roles and give us effective suggestions.
In this subproject, we developed a mobile robot platform “WITH” and an experimental environment "RoboCity"
Omni-directional Mobile Robot Platform "WITH"
We have been developing a mobile robot “WITH” as a basic research platform, which consists of three omni-wheels, four micro computers (Microchip PICs, three for motor control and one for sensor I/O control and interface with a host computer), Wireless LAN, a 8-direction IR distance sensor and batteries. As optional modules, an omni-dirctional mirror, a small PC, a RF-ID R/W, a laser range finder and a manipulator are available.
The design concepts of the robot are (i) small enough to be operated remotely or autonomously with an optional laptop PC module, (ii) hexagon shape (diagonal line: 20 [cm]) for docking with other robots, and (iii) easy to handle and maintenance. We had provided the robots for examination of efficiency of brain-like information processing and swarm intelligence research.
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Experimental Field for Mobile Robot "RoboCity"
RoboCity is an experimental environment for robotics research and education using small size mobile robots. RoboCity consists of two kinds of fields; the city side and the park side. Each field size is 5.5 [m] x 5.5 [m] and composed of twenty-five 1.1 [m] length basic square units. Therefore, we can make various topologies as we need. An unit has four RF-ID tags put on every 50 [cm] and electric power lines. On the top of the field, a 2-D motion capture system is attached to measure the robot positions.
In the city side, objects (houses, buildings, gas stations, parking, etc) and LED signal lights are set on the field to imitate town scenery. The park side is an open field to build mazes or matrix box shapes and so on.
Supposed research topics are related to learning, recognition, artificial intelligence, swarm intelligence, multi-agent problem using mobile robots, e.g. hide-and-seek, self-localizing problem, SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping), reinforcement learning for behavior generation, maze search algorithm and so on.
RoboCity has been developed as an experimental environment to evaluate robotic intelligence before carrying out experiments in real environment. We expect that RoboCitycontributes to the realization of robust and reliable robotic systems.
Movie(MPEG-4:25MB)
(2) Members
Kazuo Ishii, Tsutomu Miki, Amir A. F. Nassiraei
Published Papers
[1] Y.Takemura, M.Sato, K.Ishii, Toward Realization of Swarm Intelligence Mobile Robots, Brain-Inspired IT II, pp.273-276, Elsevier, 2006
[2] Kazuo Ishii and Tsutomu Miki, Mobile robot platforms for artificial and swarm intelligence researches, Brain-Inspired IT III, pp.39-42, Elsevier, 2007
[3] A.A.F Nassiraei, K.Ishii, Concept of Intelligent Mechanical Design for Autonomous Mobile Robots, Journal of Bionic Engineering, Vol.4, No.4, pp.281-289, 2007
[4] A.A.F Nassiraei, K.Ishii, T.Miki,et.al., Realization of Rapid Movement for Legged Entertainment Robots Using Two New Actuators, the Inertia Actuator and the Cam Charger, Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence, Vol.11,No.8, pp.979-988, 2007
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