Yeetbotics Presents: D*Lite on a Turtlebot 2
Release Overview
This release demonstrates the effectiveness of D*Lite on a Turtlebot. The Turtlebot uses PID controllers to navigate around a partially known environment. The environment is represented as a uniform grid, and obstacles can be added or removed using our custom keyboard node. The robot was shown to plan a path quickly using D*Lite and the PID control kept it on path quite well. Dead-reckoning was used for this project, and with a good amount of effort tuning the PID controllers and limiting the tolerance for error, the robot was able to run different courses ranging from 5-10 feet 5 times and still be able to return to home with only about one foot of error.
Background
This project was assigned for CS 4023/5023 Intro to Intelligent Robotics and was worth 50% of the class grade. Included in the repository is our final research-style report and the code itself. We branded the team yeetbotics in order to garner recognition from other teams in the class, both because it is a fun name and due to there being a large number of bonus points available if other teams cited our work. Our team was able to accomplish our goal of demonstrating D*Lite on a partially known environment. The software itself is at times imperfect, but it demonstrated the proof of concept well enough for our project to receive a 499/500.
Future Work
If future work is conducted on this project, it will be to improve the robot's localization to make the system more consistent. SLAM was tested briefly using the gmapping package, but this performed worse than dead reckoning with respect to localization. More work needs to be put into this area so the robot has limited error. Additionally, the code may have some bugs related to D*Lite and concurrency that need to be ironed out for a future release.