Bonaventure Undergraduate Robotics Laboratory

Catherine Mellon and Brian Zimmel experiment with a Khepera robot.

The Bonaventure Robotics Laboratory supports the integration of robotics into the undergraduate computer science curriculum and permits experimentation with behavior control algorithms. The lab is located in room 103 of the William F. Walsh Science Center.

The current robotics equipment was purchased two grants. National Science Foundation CCLI-AI Grant 9980999 in 2000 enabled the purchase of eight robotics workstations based on the Khepera miniature robot, hardware for object manipulation and vision, and a  larger Koala robot. A 2007 grant from the George I. Alden Trust enabled the Department to purchase a PeopleBot robot, a full-sized robot that is designed to interact with people.

The lab supports the Department's Robotics and Computer Vision course, CS 342,and original research under faculty supervision by its undergraduates. Seven undergraduates have served as co-authors of the labs technical reports listed below.
    

About the Robotics Lab
The lab was established in 1997 to support a robotics course. We purchased four "MIT-style" autonomous robots robots based upon the Handy Board micro-controller and Legos. Students experimented with basic behavior control algorithms. The capstone project was Cabbie, an autonomous robot that could navigate between locations in an abstract downtown Manhattan.

Shelley McClarigan working on the BARD project

Robert Harlan and David Levine wrote a successful National Science Foundation CCLI-AI grant application to expand the lab and to integrate it into the undergraduate curriculum. The grant, awarded in May of 2000, enabled the purchase of the Khepera miniature robots. This platform was selected because it permits the development of large programs that run on a host computer and communicate with the robot via a tether. Each robotic workstation has a PC running Linux, a Khepera robot and a four-foot square environment within which to experiment with control algorithms.

The department has developed an object-oriented interface for the Khepera robots in C++, which it makes available for non-commercial use free of charge through the GNU General Public License.

The lab has turrets to support object manipulation and computer vision which can be added to the Khepera platform. It also has a larger Koala robot to permit real-world experimentation.

The four-foot tall PeopleBot robot purchased throught the George I. Alden grant, has enabled the laboratory director, Dr. Robert Harlan, to combine two lines of his research — his work in artificial intelligence involving the design of planning systems that can understand commands in English and carry them out in a simulated world, and his work in robotics involving developing software that will enable a robot to function in the real world.

The coding of programs controlling the robot’s behavior, planning and reasoning will be developed by computer science undergraduates. “It will provide them with a platform for developing real-time, mission-critical software,” Harlan said, adding that students in other disciplines will be able to design and conduct experiments on how humans interact with the robot.

Harlan also noted that the PeopleBot will enable Dr. Anne Foerst, a theologian, a member of the Computer Science Department and a co-author of the Alden grant with Harlan, to continue her experimentation with human-robot interaction begun at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Foerst, co-author of the grant and an internationally known expert on human-robot interaction, is the author of God in the Machine, a book that examines what robots can teach us about being human. 
    

Technical Reports and Associated Software of the Laboratory

  1. Parsing as Search: An Easy-to-Understand RTN Interpreter
    Bonaventure Undergraduate Robotics Laboratory Technical Report 1, September, 1993
    Robert Harlan and David Patrone '93
    Originally published     SIGCSE Bulletin, 25, 3, September 1993

    This paper discusses an RTN interpreter developed in LISP for testing the conformity of commands given in English to a grammar.

    Software

  2. Parsing as Search 2: An Easy-to-Understand ATN Interpreter
    Bonaventure Bonaventure Undergraduate Robotics Laboratory Technical Report 2, September, 1996
    Robert Harlan, David Patrone '93 and Scott Alexander '96

    An extension of technical report 1, this paper discusses an semantic grammar capable of interpreting commands given in English and issuing commands in LISP to a simulated robot problem-solver.

    Software

  3. BARD: The Bonaventure Autonomous Robot Delivery System

    Bonaventure Bonaventure Undergraduate Robotics Laboratory Technical Report 3, April 2000

    Shelly McClarigan '00

    BARD uses a topological map of an office complex model to plan and carry out delivery tasks. It was developed using a Khepera robot.
     

  4. The kRobot Class Interface for the Khepera Robot
    Bonaventure Bonaventure Undergraduate Robotics Laboratory Technical Report 4, July 2000
    Robert M. Harlan, David B. Levine, Shelly McClarigan '00
         Originally published in the Proceedings of the 32nd SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education SIGCSE Bulletin vol. 33(1), 2001, ACM Press, New York, NY, pp. 105 – 109.

    The     kRobot Interface for the Khepera and Koala Robots, version 3.2

  5. Descriptions of Projects at the Bonaventure Robotics Laboratory
     Bonaventure Bonaventure Undergraduate Robotics Laboratory Technical Report 5, March 2001
    Robert M. Harlan
    Originally presented at AAAI Robotics and Education Conference, Stanford University, March 2001

    This paper discusses both lab assignments and student work on autonomous robot navigation developed at St. Bonaventure.

     
  6. Mapper II: A Robust Mapper of Unknown Environments
     Bonaventure Bonaventure Undergraduate Robotics Laboratory Technical Report 6, July, 2001
    Robert M. Harlan, Michael Neel '02 and Brian Zimmel '02

    This paper discusses an autonomous robot map generator that uses its wheel encoders to generate a metric map an unknown, rectilinear environment such as a model office building. The robot uses the rectilinear features of the environment to maintain its localization, generating an accurate map that can then be used for autonomous navigation by the robot.

    Mapper I
    Mapper II

     
  7. Scout: A Robot Capable of Generating a Map of an Indoor Space and Using the Map for Navigation
    Bonaventure Bonaventure Undergraduate Robotics Laboratory Technical Report 7, July, 2002
    Robert M. Harlan, Matthew Cowles '03 and Jamie Casilio '03

    This report discusses an autonomous robot explorer that is capable of generating a topological map of its environment and then using the map to navigate. Localization of the robot is enhanced by recording information about the features of the environment that connect the landmarks or distinctive, identifiable features of the environment.

    The report is currently being revised and thus is not available.
     
  8. AI and Robotics Labs
     Bonaventure Bonaventure Undergraduate Robotics Laboratory Technical Report 8, March 2004
    Robert M. Harlan
    Originally published in     Accessible Hands-on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Education. AAAI Press. Menlo Park, CA. 2004

    The paper discusses six labs used in the Robotics and Computer Vision course to introduce applied artificial intelligence techniques.
     
  9. Creating Emergent Behavior
     Bonaventure Bonaventure Undergraduate Robotics Laboratory Technical Report 9, August 2004
    Robert M. Harlan and Shelly McClarigan
    Originally published in     36th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. February, 2005.

    This paper presents two labs that enable undergraduate students to create emergent behavior, behavior that is not programmed by the roboticist but that emerges from the interaction of lower-level behaviors and the environment.

    Emergent Behavior Labs
    Video

Research Projects

  1. Inside the Mind of a Robot. A multi-year project to enable a robot to plan and carry out actions in the Walsh Science Center and to be able to both accept commands in English and to explain its reasoning behind its plans. The project will also investigate how humans interact with robots.
    Spring, 2008 - Present
    Robert M. Harlan
    Anne Foerst

  2. vRobot: A Graphical Simulator Using the kRobot Interface
    Honor's Project
    Greta Heissenberger '05
     

  3. Flaky: The Robot Explorer
    Summer, 2000
    Catherine Mellon '01
    Brian Zimmel '02
     

  4. Cabbie: A Centralized Planning System
    Spring, 1997
    Robert Harlan

 

 

Student Lab Solutions from CS 342, Robotics and Computer Vision

 

Spring 2008

 

Spring 2006

 

Spring 2004

Spring 2002

 

Spring 2001

 

 

Laboratory Sponsorship

The Bonaventure Robotics Laboratory and the work conducted there is sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation's Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement -- Adaptation and Innovation Program, DUE- 9980999.

 

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This page last updated:

Tuesday, September 15, 2009