Difference between revisions of "Roomba project"

Revision as of 17:59, 28 July 2010

Roomba Analysis and Modification
Short Description:	Roomba's control system study and modification
Coordinator:	GiuseppinaGini (gini@elet.polimi.it)
Tutor:	ThomasFerrari (tferrari@elet.polimi.it)
Collaborator:
Students:	AndreaScalise (andrea.scalise@aol.it), NiccoloTenti (nicotenti@libero.it)
Research Area:	Robotics
Research Topic:	Robot development
Start:	2010/05/10
End:	2010/09/25
Status:	Active
Level:	Ms
Type:	Course

This project is about studying the vacuum cleaner Roomba's brain, in order to modify and add new behaviours to it: in particular a wall-following algorithm will be implemented and tested. The interfacing with the robot will be provided by Pyro, a library, environment, graphical user interface to explore AI and robotics using the Python language.

Interfacing with Pyro

Pyro is a powerful software written in Python, used to provide a high level interface to many types of robots, regardless of their hardware structure. Here the main steps to configure properly the Pyro environment and to interface it with a Roomba.

Download and install Pyro

First of all, you need to download the latest version of Pyro. You can choose between different versions and operative systems from this website: PyroDownload. Since the project will be developed under Linux, we will refer to Linux Ubuntu OS, using the Pyro version 5.0.0. Then, you need to install it, in the usual way from terminal, with the commands:

./configure.py
make
makefile

To run the program, copy the pyrobot executable file (pyrobot.py) in your home folder, and from terminal write:

./pyrobot.py