Automation and Robotics

Project 2
Due: Nov. 26 2014 14:20
Report due: Dec. 03 2014 14:20
Project Goal
You have to develop a Road-Inspection-Bot. This robot is capable of navigating a predefined area, finding
the cracks, and at the same time avoiding all the possible obstacles. To achieve the goal, you have to design
the robot hardware and also a software planner that can control the robot to perform the inspection tasks
autonomously.
Test Field (Details see figure 1)
The test field is a "" shape area constructed by combining three tables in the classroom. Four different
kinds of color cross marks will be randomly assigned standing for the cracks on the road surface. Two
segment lines will be marked to separate the whole area into three regions. They can be used for
localization purposes. Four obstacles will be assigned in random positions.
You need to develop a Road-Inspection-Bot to find the all different kinds of color cracks in above scenario.
During the inspection, the robot needs to avoid the collision with obstacles and falling down from the table.

Figure 1. Layout of test field

Grading Policy
Both hardware and software designs will be evaluated in terms of effectiveness, performance and creativity.
The grading will be separated into two parts. One is a report, in which we will review robot designs in both
hardware and software components, and the other one is a field performance, in which we mainly evaluate
the robot performance when it perform road inspections. Detailed grading items and weights are listed as
follows:
1.

Report: you need to develop a detailed report to describe your robot. You are encouraged to include
many figures, flowchart diagrams, sketches, photos and snapshots from computer screen to help you
explain the designs. Three sections need to be included: (1) hardware design (20%) including the
conceptual design and methods to implement the design; (2) software design (20%) including the EV3
program that realizes the design; and (3) Self tests (10%) including at least two scenarios for testing
the robot and the results. The videos need to upload to YouTube.

2.

Course demonstration: each test has 180 seconds. Each team has two chances. Only the better score
will be counted as the final score. The score will be obtained following equation 1.
Min {(5*Ncrack+0.5*Tremain - Ncollision- Nfall ), 50}
Where
Ncrack: number of the robot finding the crack correctly.
Tremian : the remain time (in second) after finding all cracks.
Ncollision: number of the robot hit the obstacles.
Nfall: number of robots falls.

(1)