Portolio of David Elkan-Gonzalez

Using a robotic tugboat my team and I competed with classmates to autonomously navigate through a series of obstacles. An overhead camera was used to track robots for localization, and obstacle avoidance was done using an IR sensor mounted on a servo. For added challenge a region of the map is obscured from the overhead camera.

We competed in three challenges revolving around navigating around buoys in a circular pool. Programmming was done in LabView using an architecture that mimicked the human brain. A forebrain handled high level tasks such as path planning and goal handling.  A midbrain handled tasks such as obstacle avoidance, determining desired direction and velocity, and processing sensor data.  A hindbrain was responsible for collecting sensor data, executing motor and rudder commands, and swiveling the ir sensor to detect obstacles.