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I'm trying to work on a project which is based on navigation of a robot which is equipped with a web camera and the robot will have a ARM based board like Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone or BeagleBoard (whichever is good). What sort of line detection algorithm can be used so that it can navigate pathways without collisions or bump into obstruction. Or is a map needed for navigation irrespective of whatever robot is being used. Please answer this as i'm new to robotics as well as GIS. I'm doing this project for my undergrad finals. Also i would like to learn a bit about UAVs used for indoor navigation as done by MIT using localization Youtube video here

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up vote 5 down vote

Interesting Project

Having a Raspberry Pi myself, I have been amazed on the variety of solutions that can be done with a £25 ($35) computer. enter image description here

Update: This can be done and here is some proof:

enter image description here

http://www.flypig.co.uk/?page=list&list_id=363&list=blog

there is a video of this with the wireless keyboard http://dexterindustries.com/blog/2012/08/01/raspberry-pi-and-the-lego-mindstorms-nxt/

On Friday 10th August 2012 there was a video posted on the official news/blog for Raspberry Pi The video (English or German) shows from a very basic setup 17 LED's using the GPIO to very advanced (controlling a motor vehicle's engine rpm)

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1743 with the videos

NOTE there is a section where they are controlling small-robots. So it can already be done. The challenge is to make the robots aware of their surroundings in real-time - has the raspberry pi got enough computer power (Memory!) for this??

I am fairly sure QGIS would run on Ubuntu (slowly when processing) on an Raspberry Pi https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM but not tested.

RAM can be added to Raspberry Pi - 48GB in fact http://twitpic.com/ak51h8

There is a Raspberry Pi (Beta) Stack Exchange http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/

or ask on the official forum site http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/index.php

GeoFencing might be a good solution on a very small (indoor) scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo-fence

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Concerning the project of Indoor UAV , these UAV are using 20 rangefinders to measure the distance to obstacles in real time to avoid collisions with walls ... , but you will need much less than 20 rangefinder, if the robot can run with embed indoor map , you can use magnetometer to determine the direction of the robot, i have not an idea of the constraints of measuring the traveled distance by a robot, but if you have ( traveled distance + direction ) at real time you will have real time location.

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I think reference to 'real time' collision avoidance might include objects not mapped in the mapped layout of the room. For example if you randomly placed 5 chairs in the room could the robot avoid them? – Roy Aug 16 '12 at 14:55
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for eg 4 rangefinders (one in each side) will determine the distance between the robot and its surroundings, so with rangefinders it could make some actions to avoid collisions, and the indoor map will help the robot to navigate with general steps. – geogeek Aug 16 '12 at 15:59
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Gotcha, I thought you were proposing to drop them all together. This reminds me of my intro to engineering design course. – Roy Aug 16 '12 at 16:47

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