Robot Design 2008 at MTRN@UNSW

Each group of 3-5 students needs to design an intelligent robot from scratch with various actuators, sensors and a microprocessor communicating with a Base Station (BS), which is a PC, through a wireless modem. The on-board sensors include a pair of motors, a servo, infrared and ultrasonic range finders. The robot is driven by a pair of motors mounted on the custom-made frame of the robot.

The robot and the BS are programmed for different missions, including autonomous waypoint following, mapping, tracking, obstacle avoidance and path planning. The on-board microprocessor can handle all low-level control and simple tasks, such as obstacle avoidance, without the support from the BS, while the BS with high computational power is responsible for more intelligent tasks, e.g. real-time path planning.

For localisation, each robot carries a reflective tape. A Laser Range Finder (LRF) scanning the reflective tape acts as a virtual GPS which provides the locations of all robots in the range of the LRF. Having the feedback from the LRF, autonomous waypoint following is achieved by implementing a controller.