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SLAM for hobbyist robots - it's time.

Hobbyist robots are still too dumb. We're still seeing battery-motor-wheels, maybe with a few sonars. I had one of those 25 years ago. CPUs have advanced only from the Basic Stamp to the Atmel AVR, often in Arduno cult form. This is too lame for 2010.

A logical next step is to get visual Simultaneous Location and Mapping ("SLAM") onto hobbyist robots. Then they know where they are and what the environment is like. A cell phone with a camera has enough CPU power for this. The published papers are out there. Willow Robotics gives out some SLAM code.

Anybody doing this?

John Nagle

Reply to
John Nagle
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As I understand it, the SLAM systems in many commercial mobile robots aren't overly robust. Many rely on a 2D or 3D sick laser or the like. So its not surprising this hasn't infiltrated hobby systems.

The best resource I know of is

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its been a year or two since I last looked very hard.

- Daniel

Reply to
D Herring

At the last HBRC (Home Brew Robotics Club meeting, somebody (alas I'm not good at names), showed up with a robot that was going to do camera vision based SLAM.

One of our members showed up with a pre production version of the Neato floor cleaning robot, which uses a laser range finder (not Lidar) to perform SLAM. The environment at CMU-SV (Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley) was pretty hostile, so it lots of problems with chairs everybody was sitting in. The chairs have 4 thin chrome plated steel legs, so they behave like small cylindrical mirrors at visual wave lengths. The Neato does have a bump sensor, so it did not totally fail.

What is enabling all of this is the deployment of low cost and low power 32-bit platforms that can be placed on the robot. OpenCV (originally from Intel, not maintained by Willow Garage) is getting a lot of traction these days.

I keep hoping that one of the low cost 32-bit platforms out there will get some traction like the Arduino did.

32-bit CPU, Linux, Wi-Fi, some USB ports, and some lower level stuff like Serial, I2C, SPI, some A/DC, should be less than $50 these days.

-Wayne

Reply to
waynegramlich

The Willow Garage people have cleaned up OpenCV. See "

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". A few years ago, I tried OpenCV's stereo code, and it was awful. For example, about 10% of the time, the camera calibration program would produce total garbage. The stereo algorithm never worked very well. The LK tracker was good, though.

Willow Garage has been doing a lot of work on "astereomatching.cpp". It's worth looking at that again.

John Nagle

Reply to
John Nagle

I meant to say "now maintained" rather than "not maintained".

We have two or three people in the club having some level of success with OpenCV these days.

-Wayne

Reply to
waynegramlich

is there any psuedo code showing how SLAM works? I'd like to code it in 6502 assembly language

Reply to
rich12345

u,mmmm how about starting this project and revive this group?

maybe we can flood it with REAL hobbyist and professional posts and ignore the spammers?

Reply to
rich12345

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