Autonomous Exploration of a Building
ICT & Technology
Client company:Safety & Security Campus
Project description
The project aims to create an autonomous system capable of exploring indoor environments, and provide a clear and understandable view on the situational awareness of explored environments to the robot's operator, both in Live View scenarios as well as in 'radio silent' scenarios.
Context
Defense, police, fire department, customs, GGD and Brainport have united in the Safety & Security Campus (SSC), stationed at the Oirschot army base. The primary goal of the SSC is to test operationally useful applications of promising new technologies.
Our project is in the safety domain, a domain which aims to protect employees by researching and testing the extent to which robotics and autonomous systems can be used in situations that are dangerous for humans.
Results
Our project group have made a dashboard allowing for the robot's progress to be displayed in real time, as well as live map generation as the exploration happens. The robot's software has also been made more robust and now supports controlling the robot using the dashboard over a network connection, rather than just over bluetooth.
Research has also been done into updating the robot's operating system from ROS to ROS2, and the code has been refactored in a way which facilitates this update procedure.