Welcome to Robotics @ Maryland
R@M is the University of Maryland's student robotics team. We design and build autonomous robots to compete against other schools and organizations. The club formed in 2006; since then, R@M has grown to four robots and roughly 40 members.
Robotics @ Maryland membership is open to any UMD student, regardless of major. To get involved, contact any of our officers or come to a meeting.
Thank you to our generous sponsors!
News (see archive)
Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Threat of Snow Can Keep Tortuga Out of the Water!
Tortuga took a dive today, but with an exciting new addition: we now have a Teledyne Explorer DVL attached!
You can see the two new separate housings attached to the bottom of the robot. Though we have had the components for a fair bit of time, today marked the first complete integration test with the new sensor array.
The R@M AUV team would like to thank Teledyne for letting us borrow this DVL for integration testing.
The AUV team is also busy completing a number of other upgrades which will help us complete the competition course! Look forward to more updates soon.
Winter with the robots
Donatello will come back from winter break with some nice new skills and a whole lot more reliability.
R@M meetings resumed on Jan. 5 (every Tuesday and Thursday at 5), and recent work has focused on controls and communication. Donatello can now be teleoperated across the Internet, giving a remote operator (next door or around the world) a clear view of the robot's surroundings — live cameras, LADAR and updates on the propulsion and power systems. The robot works in any place where the UMD wireless network is available, and we'll be adding new antennas to fill in the weak spots between buildings.
Several projects are in progress:
- Mechanical: This subteam is building a modular onboard electronics rack. We'll be replacing the old ATX computer case with a slot-based platform, where hardware changes won't have to take the robot down for hours (or days).
- Sensors: The electronics and software teams are designing and building a new sensor array to enable accurate odometry. This system (a mix of optical and magnetic sensors and microcontrollers to process the data) will replace our less accurate, not-that-consistent speed measurement method, and we'll get a second source of angular velocity readings to supplement the data from our principal steering system.
- Software: The high-level control software was built on top of the Player robot server, but we're migrating to ROS, which is easier to extend, has more pre-built modules and is getting greater developer attention.
- Vision: Line following, sidewalk detection and LADAR-based object detection are major vision tasks, and it's about time for us to get some work done on those subjects.
- Planning: Our planner will plot out safe paths to get the robot from A to B.
- State estimator: Every sensor is noisy, and some get worse as they go along. We'll use a range of sensors and a bit of filtering software to derive a high-certainty estimate of the robot's position, velocity and acceleration.
We plan to have the platform (hardware support, motion control and software architecture) in a stable and usable state by the end of the winter break, when we will be able to switch our attention to integrating sensor data and making Donatello an autonomous robot.
Raphael takes 4th place in the 2nd annual Autonomous Robot Speedway Competition
After working through the night into Saturday morning, the team was able to program Raphael to successfully navigate the competition course in the 4th fastest time. Raphael lost to the 3rd place team by a mere 4/10 of a second, taking 4th place out of 12 robots, after being penalized 9 seconds for hitting 3 cones.
Mechanical work on Raphael was completed the Thursday before last. A new rear servo was installed to allow the robot to steer both the front and rear wheels. Our turning radius before adding the rear servo was dismal.
Raphael uses Player/Stage to interface with various systems. On Tuesday we finished writing a fiducial driver to filter laser data and only pass cone points through to the deeper control systems. Unfortunately, the k-means clustering that we based the driver on didn't detect cones very well and was computationally expensive. We didn't realize this until Friday, after spending a majority of Thursday testing the k-means driver and a couple other basic obstacle avoiding algorithms.
On Friday we implemented a new cone filtering solution. This time everything worked extremely well, the driver was able to detect every cone with a fairly low amount of noise. However, after testing well into Friday night, we realized that we needed a new control algorithm. Even with near perfect cone detection, Raphael could barely get past a handful of cones.
Shortly before the competition Saturday morning, we emerged with a new control algorithm that worked surprisingly well. Although we didn't get much time to test and tweak our new algorithm, we had the 1st and 2nd place robots in our sights. We cranked Raphael's speed up to almost 90% and let him go. Raphael completed the first lap flawlessly, but then on the last 1/4 of the last lap, Raphael swerved to avoid hitting a cone on its left side, only to slam into two cones and graze a third on its right.
Thank you to all our sponsors and everyone who came out to watch and cheer us on.
Introductory meeting, First Look Fair, Eng. Community Picnic
R@M spent the last two days spreading information about the club and recruiting. We set up a pair of tables at the First Look Fair on McKeldin Mall both days, with Tortuga on display and Donatello driving around (and hauling people on the grass). After the rain essentially ended the FLF Thursday (but failed to do any damage to the 'bots), we moved the whole display to the field outside Martin Hall for the Engineering Community Picnic, where we found another lot of interested people. (We had Donatello carry Tortuga the whole way, naturally.) The day's third R@M event was the opening new-member meeting, where several leaders introduced potential recruits to the robots' workings.
We will be holding another introductory meeting on Tuesday, 9/22, at 6:30 in the Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility. If you're interested in joining the club or just want to see what we're doing, be there!
Also, we have a new announcements mailing list. If you were on the Yahoo! group, you've been subscribed to this one. Otherwise, you should sign up to keep track of changes in meeting schedules and other big news.
Robotics @ Maryland attends AUVSI Conference and Exhibition
Robotics @ Maryland (R@M) will be at AUVSI Unmanned Systems North America 2009 from August 11th to 13th. We will have a table in the exhibitors area next to the other AUVSI AUV Competition competitors. We will have Tortuga III? and demonstrations of our software? on display. This is the largest unmanned systems conference and exhibition in the world, and R@M looks forward to seeing what it has to offer and showing off our hard work.