What Is Robot Projects?

Robot projects is a series of projects done for my robotics class at Brooklyn College. Me and my team consisting of Matt, Yasmine, and Saheed worked together to program a roomba to overcome various challenges given to us by our professor.

Our roomba with a webcam attached making use of computer vision.

How Did We Program It?

In addition to an actual roomba, we made use of C++, Ubuntu, and Player to help us interface with the roomba and give it commands.

For some projects, we made use of a simulation to test our code with a virtual robot and others we strictly just used the roomba itself. In the following image, we used computer vision to have the roomba track and follow Matt’s red shirt. Whenever Matt goes out of frame, the roomba will rotate until it spots something red and accelerates towards it until coming to a complete stop right before hitting what it’s tracking!

Pictured: Roomba that wishes it could wear red shirts.

Challenges

Perhaps the biggest challenge of the project was that the majority of the team hadn’t used C++ before and had limited experience with version control. Also, documentation on Player wasn’t exactly the best either…

I’ve used C++ and Git a fair amount before coming to the class so I was able to help bring everyone up to speed and teach everyone the ropes on how to use Git and GitHub. Within the week, we were able to all start collaborating and making contributions to the project. We also used Doxygen to generate documentation as a web page for the code we were writing.

By the end, I’m happy to say that we all earned A’s in what was a very difficult course!