Proteus research update

Hi all!

A good half of my research experience here at EURECA has quickly gone by, and I wanted to give an update on how the project is going along.
There were two main tasks that I am supposed to help with for the robots this summer (using the subsumption technique I described in the last post):

1. Line following using a camera (the driver is called CMUCAM2), which will greatly enhance the flexibility of the robot's motion tasks.
2. Obstacle avoidance using a method called VFH (vector field histogram), extending them to multiple robots.

The main software algorithms have been written for the two tasks, and in the past few days we were able to use the programs on the actual robots.
There will be a couple of fine-tuning (redesigning of the algorithms, if necessary) in order to make the tasks as flexible and smooth as possible.
I plan to do this within the next few weeks along with the other software research students, and hopefully we can realize these enhancement ideas well!

One of the biggest drawbacks of the recent experiments that the software students and I were doing were the clashes between simulation and true experimentation.
For example, there were some algorithms that we thought of that worked fairly well on simulation well, but not well on the actual robots.
In order to overcome this setback (that I think is universal), we need to also think of a better way to debug or observe the robot's behavior.

It would be fantastic if these useful features of the robots can be implemented within the next few weeks!

--Arthur