Control Structure - D7039E-E7032E/Project-Report GitHub Wiki

By Scott Fredriksson

Introduction

The robot needs to be able to navigate unknown environments, a robust and reliable control system is needed to achieve this. This report is about the structure of this system.

Note that this control system is currently being developed and changes may occur!

The System

The control system is divided into four parts as seen in the figure below.

This figure demonstrate the four different parts of the control system and how they depend on each other. Each component will control the parts beneath. Higher system takes long term decisions but are less detailed in how they should be executed. While lower system takes short term, but more detailed decisions.

Robot

This part is the robot witch is being control. It's the actuators and sensors of the robots and the system thats is being regulated by the path follower.

Path Follower

The purpose of the path follower is to steer the robot's actuators so that the robot follows a path determined by the local navigator. A more detailed description of the path follower can be found here!

Local Navigator

The local navigator's purpose is to navigate the local environment, as the name implies. It avoids obstacles and keeping an optimal distance to walls to give optimal scanning quality. It will drive towards the direction given by the layout navigator.

Layout Navigator

The purpose of the layout navigator is to find in which direction the robot should go to reach its goal. The goal is a point either randomly selected, when operating in random exploration mode, or a manually chosen. It will use information from the global map, a map of the combined scans from all robots, to determine a path. It will also communicate with other robots so that they take different paths towards the same goal. This to ensure that the exploration is as efficient as possible.