Started Labbook 2017.

December 21, 2016

If I want to make use of the exercises of the book Mobile Robots, I should first buy it. Still, enough material is available at the authors site.

December 15, 2016

Downloaded old but extensive presentation from slideplayer, published by Lee Shields.

The Quiz page of AMRx 2014 promises a number of questions, but I cannot find the start of the quiz.
Enroled in AMRx 2016 and could access the final Quiz.
Discussed during class the first SLAM-question and the first Motion Planning question. The harmonic potential field is mentioned at p. 391, with the Laplace equation (6.12). The benefit of this approach is the complete absence of local minima (p. 392), because the start position is pulled up to a high potential, while the goal position is pulled down to the ground.
The dynamic window approach is described on pages 402-404. There are two versions, the local and global. No guarantees in the textbook. In the slides it is mentioned that the cost-function is prone to local optima.
The Velocity Obstacle and Reciprocal Velocity Obstacle techniques are not described in the textbook, although it seems an extention to the curvature velocity approach. The slides mention that the method is restricted to omni-directional robots, nothing is mentioned about non-holonomic (although the drawings are allfor a round shape). The cited article indicates that RVA was originally for holonomic robots.

Matlab is still running under Academic License on nb-ros: version R2015a.
Showed today the following videos on youtube:
1. External Motion Tracking in The Flying Machine Arena of ETH Zurich.
2. Visual tags used by Kiva Warehouse Robots at Work.
3. Visual tags used by the Pixhawk team in IMAV 2010 competition.