Robotics Lecture Course (course code 333)I teach the Robotics Course in the Department of Computing, attended by third years and MSc students. This is a one term course which focuses on mobile robotics, and aims to cover the basic issues in this dynamic field via lectures and a large practical element where students work in groups and implement robotics ideas using the Lego Mindstorms NXT kits and, since 2014, the Raspberry Pi single board computer and Python using BrickPi interface boards. The course always finishes with a competition where the groups compete to build and program the robot which can most effectively complete a certain challenge against the clock. See the bottom of this page for pictures and videos from previous years' competitions.
Huge thanks to Robert Lukierski, Lukas Platinsky, Tristan Laidlow, Andrea Nicastro and Jan Czarnowski who are the current lab assistants, have helped a lot with the development of the practicals, have repaired broken kits (thanks Robert!!) and are another point of contact for any problems. Thank you very much to Stefan Leutenegger who co-taught the course with me last year and developed new material. Thank you to Duncan White, Geoff Bruce and other colleagues from the department's Computing Support Group, and to teaching fellow Maria Valera-Espina, who helped significantly in the transition to the Raspberry Pi-based platform in 2014. Thank you to Jan Jachnik, Jacek Zienkiewicz, Jindong Liu, Adrien Angeli, Ankur Handa and Simon Overell who were previous Course Support Leaders and tutorial helpers on the course and substantially helped with the preparation of materials and exercises; and to Ian Harries and Keith Clark who developed earlier material from which the current course has evolved. In particular Ian Harries deserves the credit for making this the practically-driven course it still is today. Lecture and practical sheets for the course will be available for printing from the links below (the links will come alive gradually throughout term). I will hand out the practical sheets each week in paper form. Extra material relevant to each week's lecture or practical which would probably be useful for you to look at is available from links below the lecture plan. Spring 2016 Lecture PlanThe timetabled slots for Robotics are for four hours a week, on Tuesdays, from 9am to 11am and Fridays, from 2pm to 4pm. Most weeks we will have a one hour lecture at 9am on Tuesday and then head down straight down to the lab for a practical from 10-11am. The supervised practical session will continue on Friday afternoons from 2-4pm. Lectures on Tuesdays are in Lecture Theatre 308, Huxley Building and practicals are in Teaching side lab 202, Huxley Building. The course runs for 8 weeks from week 2 to week 9 of college term; but we will not use all of the timetabled slots to hit the regulation department course length of 28 hours. The full plan for lectures and tutorials will be kept up to date below, and I will also announce it in lectures.
From the second week onwards, practical exercises will be set in the lectures and assessed regularly in the labs as explained clearly in the practical sheets via demonstration and discussion with one of the lab assistants. I will ask you to organise yourselves into fixed groups for the practical sessions throughout term. These assessed practicals form the only coursework element of the Robotics course, and no additional assessed exercises will be set. We will add up all marks from practical assessments throughout term to form a final coursework mark for each group. Each practical group will be given a Raspberry Pi/Lego NXT robotics kit to keep and be responsible for during the whole term, so you will be able to spend extra time as needed during the week to complete the practical exercises. The number of members in each group will be confirmed in lectures in the second week depending on how many students take the course but will probably be 4 or 5. Note that in the first week (19th and 22nd January) there will be no practical. We will have two hours of lecture on Tuesday 19th from 9am to 11am and then a one hour pen and paper tutorial in the lecture room on Friday 22nd from 2pm to 3pm. We will not use the Friday 3pm slot in the first week.
Additional HandoutsThe directory RoboticsResources/ contains all the lecture notes, tutorial sheets, additional handouts below and also bits of code that I point to in the practicals.Here are electronic versions of extra handouts given out in paper form during the course and some additional resources.
Localisation Challenge in 2015This year we again had a large class (150) and introduced new custom motor controllor software by Stefan Leutenegger and Jan Jachnik to run on the Raspberry Pi/BrickPi kits. The groups had to tune their own PID controllers to make their robots move smoothly and repeatably. The final challenge was localisation in a course next to a wall, where three locations had to be visited as quickly as possible. The challenge was won by the team of Arnas Kaminskas, Baisheng Song, Jiayun Ding, Siqi Wei and Yiming Lin who overcame various hardware difficulties during to course to build a very well calibrated and precise robot.
Localisation Challenge in 2014In 2014, with more students than ever on the course (140+), for the first time we used a new robotics platform with the combination of Raspberry Pi/BrickPi/Python/Lego NXT motors and sensors. For this year's challenge the groups had to build robots which used odometry and sonar to solve a tricky localisation and navigation problem as fast as possible. Within a walled area for which the teams were given a map in advance, the robot was placed in one of five known locations chosen randomly and at a random orientation. It had to recognise its location by taking a sonar scan and matching this against saved templates, then set off to navigate to each of the other four locations in turn before returning to its start point, using continuous Monte Carlo Localisation or other techniques of the group's choice. Accurate motor control proved to be tricky via BrickPi (something we have hopefully improved substantially for 2015 with new low level control software), but some groups still achieved very good solutions. This is the very impressive winning robot from the team of Christos Karamanos, Panos Evagorou, Pamela Cruz and Andrew Jack which used the sonar to full advantage during navigation by deliberately turning it to point orthogonally at walls for high quality measurements.
Localisation Challenge in 2013We returned to a localisation challenge similar to the one in 2011, with the groups' robots racing against the clock to reach three waypoints in a course laid out close to the wall of the lab. A wall-following approach was generally the most successful. This year there were a very large number of students doing the course, and we had 29 groups competing, of which around 10 managed to complete the course. Several groups got very good times, but with a fast time in their second run the group of Udara Gamalath, Alejandro Garcia Ochoa, Tristan Pollitt, Shailesh Ghimire and Maxwell Popescu clinched victory in 51 seconds. Sorry that I don't have a video of their robot's winning run!
Mapping and Navigation Challenge in 2012This year we had a completely new challenge where the teams had to build robots able to cross an area filled with obstacles without bumping into any of them. The robots had to rely on good odometry for localisation, and then use sonar to detect obstacles and plan a path between them. Marks were given depending on how far the robots managed to advance, with extra time points for those teams that made it all the way across. The starting point was the techniques for occupancy grid mapping we had learnt in the course, but the desire for speed meant that many teams switched to simpler methods due to the high computational cost of occupancy mapping.The winning robot was developed by Nicolas Paglieri, Clemens Lutz, Antonio Azevedo and Francesco Giovannini and completed the challenge in a remarkably fast 21 seconds, though impressively around half of the teams completed the whole course and a couple came close to this time. The winning team's robot used the Lego light sensors cleverly as proximity sensors, allowing giving the robot an extra obstacle sensor which was particularly useful at high speed, and this together with fast planning gave them the best time.
 MTS
Localisation Challenge in 2011We used quite a different layout for this year's localisation challenge, with the robots needing to recognise their location and orientation in one of three randomly chosen places and then navigate fast along a long corridor to pre-determined waypoints. Marks were given both for accuracy and time.The winners' robot was remarkably precise, and its motion included particularly nice curved entries into the waypoint spaces, all while maintaining very good speed such that it beat its nearest competitor by 8 seconds. The members of the winning group were Alexandre Vicente, Ajay Lakshmanan, Garance Bruneau, Kevin Keraudren, Axel Bonnet and Zae Kim (video courtesy of Jindong Liu).
 MP4
Localisation Challenge in 2010The challenge this year was similar to 2009, but in a new course and with a marking scheme which emphasized accuracy over speed. Again, the robots were placed randomly by me at one of five pre-learned waypoints and had to determine their locations and navigate autonomously to all of the other waypoints --- within 5cm accuracy to gain full marks, which was a challenging problem.The winning team this time consisted of Jim Li, Daniel Abebe, Robert Kopaczyk, Nicholas Heung and Cheuk Tam, and their robot's successful completion of the course in under 40 seconds is shown below (video courtesy of the team).
Localisation Challenge in 2009This year's competition challenge required the robots to first localise from scratch at one of five pre-learned locations, and then to localise continuously to navigate around a route of waypoints. The whole process was timed so there was some need to trade off accuracy for speed in order to win.Again there were several teams which achieved the challenge impressively within the target time of 30 seconds, but the winners by a narrow margin were Ivan Dryanovski, Tingting Li, Wenbin Li, Edmund Noon and Ke Wang whose winning run is shown in the video below (video courtesy of the team).  MPEG
Monte Carlo Localisation in 2008The challenge at the end of the course in 2008 was to implement a probabilistic localisation algorithm based on particle filtering, using the Lego Mindstorms NXT kits with motor odometry, sonar and compass sensors. The groups were given a "map" of a small enclosed area, indicating the measured locations of walls relative to a fixed coordinate system. The goal was to use Monte Carlo Localisation to keep a continuous estimate of the moving robot's position which was good enough to accurately follow a pre-defined path through a sequence of waypoints.Several of the teams achieved good results, and one or two even made promising progress on the more difficult problem of global localisation (the "kidnapped robot problem"), where the robot had to initialise a localisation estimate from scratch when dropped at an arbitrary position in the course. This video shows the robot of the team of David Passingham, Vincent Dedoyard, John Payce and Mengru Li in action (video courtesy of the team).
Robot Obstacle Course in 2007At the end of the course in 2007 we had a robot obstacle course challenge where the students in groups of three or four designed Lego robots to reach a light beacon while bouncing off and avoiding obstacles. The robots used light sensors to detect the direction of the bright light and bump sensors to detect collisions. Each of the robots was timed over three runs from different start points on a course constructed by Simon Overell.
The winning robot was from the team of Philip Stennett, Nicholas Ball, Maurice Adler and Wei Chieh Soon which completed the course all three times with a total time of 36.9 seconds --- this is a (very dark) video of their robot in action . The robots from the team of Si Yu Li, Henry Arnold, Shobhit Srivastava and Jonathan Dorling, and the team of Ricky Shrestha, Hussein Elgridly and Maxim Zverev also successfully completed the course three times. Robot Racing in 2006Last year we finished the course with a time-trial competition between Lego line-following robots designed and programmed by the students in groups of three. The robots used downward-looking light sensors to observe the line, and ran programs written in the C-like NQC language. The robots were timed over three laps of this course, which the groups saw for the first time on the day of the races:
|
|
|
