CoolBOT Demonstrates on Activ Media Robotics

CoolBOT has been conceived to promote incremental, integrability design and robustness of software developments in robotics. A simple demonstrator shown to illustrate how such principles manifest in systems built using CoolBOT. It has been implemented and tested using a pioneer 2DX robot from Activ Media Robotics. It illustrates how a mobile robot can be endowed with different capabilities by means of integrating components in an incremental way using CoolBOT. Thus initially the robot will only be able to avoid obstacles moving away from them and it will end up with a wanderer behavior with obstacle avoidance.

The demonstrator consists of two components: the PF Avoiding and the Pioneer components. The Pioneer component is a component that encapsulates the set of effectors and sensors provided by Activ Media Robotics Pioneer robot. The PF Avoiding component makes use of a potential approach using repulsive potential fields to perform obstacles avoidance using sonar robot reading as sensory information. When this component configuration is executed in the robot, the observable behavior is that the robot remains still if there are no obstacle close enough. The robot will move away in the event that an obstacle gets closer. This behavior could allow a people to herd the robot, as the robot behaves in order to keep itself far enough from obstacles.

In the second and last level of demonstrator which adds two components on top of avoiding level presented the Strategic PF and Wander components. The Strategic PF is a components that uses like the PF Avoiding, a potential field approach to implement several behaviors, namely “a move” behavior using an uniform potential field, a “go to” behavior making use of an attractive potential field, and a “docking” behavior utilizing a “docking” potential field. This component feeds periodically the PF Avoiding with strategic potential field vectors. The PF Avoiding adds these vectors of strategic to the repulsive potential field.