26 4 Todo

Informations about what our robot could be up against

Another key activity is our Robotics Challenge. This is not actually a competition (at least, not yet), but if you bring your robot you will not only have a chance to test it against realistic tasks in rugged, Mars-like terrain, but also on a set of special standardised engineering tests which I am building for us now. So your robot will really be pitched against the tasks, not against the other robots. (Still, people love races - so you can expect a little bit of friendly competition as we see whose robots perform the best!) If you’re an engineer, you’ll know about the importance of standards, or benchmarks, for the development of machines of all kinds. But up until very recently, there have been no standard tests for field robots of the kind we’re building. Now, the US National Institute of Standards has developed a whole raft of tests designed for what they call response robots – those designed for disaster relief or anti-terrorist work. We’ll adapt these for our purpose – designing robots for human use at a future Mars base. You can see the NIST tests at http://www.nist.gov/el/isd/ks/upload/DHS_NIST_ASTM_Robot_Test_Methods-2.pdf We’ll give you the opportunity to measure your robot’s performance on a selection of eight of these tests and you will come away with valuable measurements and a better understanding of your machine’s strengths and weaknesses. I’ll give you more details of these NIST tests in future email.

I’ve also planned three ‘operational tests’, in which we will model your robot working on the surface of Mars. There’s an Irregular Terrain Traversal, which simply tests your robot’s speed and agility over challenging 500m course of sand and rocks. There’s also a photo reconnaissance task in which your robot is sent to particular GPS coordinates (it can be sent to GPS coordinates, can’t it?) and get images of a target object there. If your robot has arms, it will be tasked with bringing back a small target object from the site. Finally, we’ll have a search-and-rescue scenario, in which you robot has to locate and assist an injured astronaut who has fallen and needs help to get back to the habitat. Again, more details about these in a future email.

TODO:

• Create a list of the type of activities the robot should be able to attempt.
• Look at how to create/handle point clouds (Try Point Cloud Library)
• Look up SLAM and the various ROS implementations of it
• Look into using openCV for vision processing