ENGR 499 Engineering Science and Systems:
From Humans to Robots

Course Team
Lab 1
Lab 2
Lab 3
Lab 4
Lab 5
Lab 6
Lab 7
Lab 8
Final Project
Lab 7: Sensing and movement 4: Move to Goal
This exercise uses a similar setup from the previous exercise. The purpose of this exercise is to create a robot controller that moves the robot to a goal.
In order to move to a goal, two pieces of information are needed:
  1. The distance of the robot from the goal
  2. The direction of the robot is facing from the goal
What should the robot do in the following situations?
need picture of wall-following
need picture of wall-following need picture of wall-following need picture of wall-following
Objective (10 pts):
Write a program to move the robot within 0.1 meters of a goal (goalX,goalY). This program will be evaluated by how efficiently it moves from its starting pose to the goal pose.
Homework (due 11/09/07 9:00 am):
Write pseudocode to decide whether or not to move the robot forward, and how to turn the robot. (10 pts) Hint: this is really a set of if/then statements to set lvel and rvel similar to the two previous labs
Homework (due 11/16/07 9:00 am:
Now consider that there are obstacles in the environment, what changes need to be made to avoid obstacles...
  1. What rules (if statements) could be used with FLBR values, for example, to keep the robot from running into an obstacle? (5 pts)
  2. What rules could be used with FLBR values to help steer the robot away from obstacles? (10 pts)
  3. Which order should these rules be run with respect to the rules to make the robot drive toward the goal, and why? (10 pts) Put another way, should the obstacle avoidance be run before the goto goal behavior, or the reverse?
Maintained by David Feil-Seifer. Last Edited: November 11th 2007.