Welcome!

Welcome to the RAFS project website. This webpage will be used to communicate with those following the progress of our project.

Our project involves the new ActivMedia robots the School of Engineering at SIUE has recently acquired. We must enable one of these robots to rearrange chairs in the Senior Project Laboratory in the Engineering Building. When the School of Engineering bought our robot, the robot was able to move from the keyboard just like a remote controlled car. It also could do basic movement that was written from code, such as a simple patrol movement. A patrol is when the robot goes a specified distance, turns around, and goes back to where he started, and that process is repeated. He also came with a little wander program, which is where the robot just aimlessly moves around. This could possibly be used in our project. We have to program the robot to arrange the chairs in such a way to where the user simply has to turn on the robot and run the program.

For more information regarding our Problem Definitions, please see the Documents area.
For the most current information about our progress, visit the News and Progress areas.

Equipment

We will be using the ActivMedia Pioneer 2 robot within SIUE's Engineering Building room 2029 to complete the chair arranging task. If you would like to find out more about the robot's capabilities, look at the Robots page, or visit robots.activmedia.com. In specific, if you want to look at the ARIA API, click here. If you want to look at the Saphira API, click here.

Planning

What the Robot Aided Feng Shui team has accomplished in CS425:

• Researched the problem to achieve an accurate description.
• Conceived a coherent design to solve the problem.
• Planned the implementation of our solution.
• Explored the systems and capabilities of our robot.
• See the Documents area for more details.

Important skills our team has developed:

• Writing technical documentation for both Engineering and Management.
• Working successfully against a deadline.
• Sharpened our UNIX and Linux skills.

Implementation

In CS 499, we are dealing with the implementation of our project. We will develop our project with four main points in mind (see the Design Document for the Lifecycle Model for each point), and we will develop those in three releases ( see the Releases page for more details). The four main points we need to address are:

1. LOCATE A CHAIR. We will locate a chair using brightly colored stickers. As of this point, we will use a sticker around the base of the chair, making it visible from every angle the robot could approach the chair. We will also put a small sticker on every leg of the chair so the robot can tell where to grab the chair. We will try to implement this portion of the project with a sticker on only one leg, or maybe none (if possible).

2. LOCATE AN EMPTY DESK. We have changed the way we will locate a desk from our Design Document. Since we are using localization, we can simply put a point on our map that will be recognized as a desk. When the chair gets within a certain range, that chair will be placed in the correct spot.

3. MOVE WITH A CHAIR. Before we grab the chair, we will find a path from the chair to the desk. Once this path is established, we will grab the chair, then follow that predetermined path to put the chair back where it belongs.

4. MOVE WITHOUT A CHAIR. We will use the built-in collision detection at the beginning of the project, and we will develop the collision detection with time permitting. We will do as much as we can with the time we will have left before we graduate. This is the lowest priority of all the models.

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