Robótica inteligente: Implementación de sensores 3D para desenvolvimiento de robots móviles y vehículos autónomos

Abstract

This project was developed in the Universidade de São Paulo in Brasil, on the campus located in the city of São Carlos. The work was done specifically in the Laboratório de Robótica Móvel, which belongs to the Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e Computação. As its name indicates, this laboratory does research and develops applications related to the area of mobile robotics. The project consisted on developing an application that allows a mobile robot to navigate autonomously, avoiding obstacles, until it reaches a specific coordinate point defined by the user. For the design and implementation of this application, it is necessary to keep in mind that navigation and obstacle detection are based on the use of 3D sensors. For this purpose, the Kinect was selected. The simulation and testing of the project was done in a special simulation environment for robotic applications, called V-REP. The project development process began with the elaboration of navigation algorithms for obstacle avoidance. Once this goal was achieved, the potential fields theory was implemented and other sensors were used to determine the robot‟s spatial position and orientation, with the objective of defining a trajectory to the goal coordinate point, thus doing a more efficient navigation. Finally, real data from the physical sensors was used to corroborate the functioning of the application, with the purpose of comparing it with the previously obtained results from the simulated part.